The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology

The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology Edited by

David Fergusson

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology

Blackwell Companions to Religion The Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field, and is presented in a style which is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward-thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience.

The Blackwell Companion to Judaism Edited by Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery-Peck

The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism Edited by James J. Buckley, Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, and Trent Pomplun

The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion Edited by Richard K. Fenn

The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity Edited by Ken Parry

The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible Edited by Leo G. Perdue

The Blackwell Companion to the Theologians Edited by Ian S. Markham

The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology Edited by Graham Ward

The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature Edited by Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, John Roberts, and Christopher Rowland

Published

The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism Edited by Gavin Flood The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology Edited by Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh The Blackwell Companion to Protestantism Edited by Alister E. McGrath and Darren C. Marks The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology Edited by Gareth Jones

The Blackwell Companion to NineteenthCentury Theology Edited by David Fergusson

Forthcoming The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament Edited by David E. Aune The Blackwell Companion to Jesus Edited by Delbert Burkett

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America Edited by Philip Goff

The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics Edited by William Schweiker

The Blackwell Companion to African Religions Edited by Elias Bongmba

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality Edited by Arthur Holder

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism Edited by Julia A. Lamm

The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion Edited by Robert A. Segal

The Blackwell Companion to Pastoral Theology Edited by Bonnie Miller McLemore

The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’a¯n Edited by Andrew Rippin

The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence Edited by Andrew Murphy

The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘ The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture Edited by John F. A. Sawyer

The Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions Edited by Randall Nadeau The Blackwell Companion to Buddhism Edited by Mario Poceski

The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology Edited by

David Fergusson

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 David Fergusson Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of David Fergusson to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Blackwell companion to nineteenth-century theology / edited by David Fergusson. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-21718-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Theology, Doctrinal–History–19th century. I. Fergusson, David. II. Title: Companion to nineteenth-century theology. BT28.B55 2010 230.09′034–dc22 2009045855 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5/13pt Photina by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Singapore 1 2010

Contents

List of Contributors

vii

Preface

xi

Part I Key Thinkers and Their Influence

1

1 Kant Nicholas Adams

3

2 Schleiermacher Christine Helmer

31

3 Hegel David Fergusson

58

4 Coleridge Stephen R. Holmes

76

5 Kierkegaard David R. Law

97

6 Newman Frank M. Turner

119

Part II Trends and Movements

139

7 Natural Science and Theology James C. Livingston

141

8 Romanticism and Pantheism Julia A. Lamm

165

vi

CONTENTS

9 Roman Catholic Theology: Tübingen Bradford E. Hinze

187

10 Russian Theology Olga Nesmiyanova

214

11 Evangelicalism David W. Bebbington

235

12 Kenotic Christology David R. Law

251

13 Mediating Anglicanism: Maurice, Gore, and Temple Ulrike Link-Wieczorek

280

14 Mediating Theology in Germany Matthias Gockel

301

15 America: Confessional Theologies James D. Bratt

319

16 America: Transcendentalism to Social Gospel Robert W. Jenson

339

17 Reformed Theology in Scotland and the Netherlands Graham McFarlane

358

18 Neo-Scholasticism Ralph Del Colle

375

19 The Bible and Literary Interpretation Stephen Prickett

395

20 Skeptics and Anti-Theologians George Pattison

412

21 History of Religion School Mark D. Chapman

434

22 The Bible and Theology John W. Rogerson

455

23 Liberal Theology in Germany Christine Axt-Piscalar

468

24 Catholic Modernism Gerard Loughlin

486

Index

509

Contributors

Nicholas Adams teaches theology and ethics at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Habermas and Theology (2006) and several articles on German Idealism in relation to theology and on the inter-faith practice of scriptural reasoning. His principal focus of research is the relation between tradition and public reasoning. Christine Axt-Piscalar is Professor of Systematic Theology at the GeorgAugust University of Göttingen. Her publications include Der Grund des Glaubens. Eine theologiegeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Trinität und Glaube in der Theologie I.A. Dorners (1990); and Ohnmächtige Freiheit. Studien zum Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Sünde bei Tholuck, Julius Müller, Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard (1996). She is an editor of the series Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie and of the journal Kerygma und Dogma. David W. Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling. His recent publications include The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (2004); and The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (2005). James D. Bratt is Professor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has published extensively on the history of Dutch and DutchAmerican Calvinism and on the topic of theology and society in the pre–Civil War United States. Among his publications are the essay “The Reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835–1845,” Church History 67, no. 1 (March 1998): 52–82; and two critical anthologies of primary texts, Antirevivalism in Antebellum America (2006), and Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (1998). Mark D. Chapman is Vice-Principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford; Reader in Modern Theology in the University of Oxford; and Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University. He has written widely in different areas of theology and is coeditor of the Journal for the History of Modern Theology. His most recent books are Doing God: Religion and Public Policy in Brown’s Britain (2008); and Anglicanism: A Very Short Introduction (2006).

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

Ralph Del Colle is Associate Professor of Theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His specialist interests include Christology, pneumatology, Trinitarian theology, and the theology of grace. His doctoral dissertation, Christ and the Spirit: Spirit-Christology in Trinitarian Perspective, was published in 1994. He has contributed a chapter on the “Triune God” to the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (1997) and one on “The Church” to The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (2008). He is also co-editor of the International Journal of Systematic Theology. David Fergusson is Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh and Principal of New College. He is the author of Faith and Its Critics (2009), based on his Glasgow Gifford Lectures, and Church, State and Civil Society (2004). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Matthias Gockel received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and currently holds a teaching position in Systematic Theology and Ethics in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Jena. His recent publications include Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-Theological Comparison (2006). Christine Helmer is Professor of Religion and Adjunct Professor of German at Northwestern University. She has taught theology at the Claremont School of Theology and at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of The Trinity and Martin Luther (1999) and is contributing editor and co-editor of eight volumes in the areas of biblical theology, philosophy of religion, Schleiermacher studies, and Luther studies, most recently The Global Luther (2009). Her current research topics are liberal theologies and Luther’s “dangerous doctrines.” Bradford E. Hinze is Professor of Theology at Fordham University, Bronx, New York. His recent book is Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments (2006). Recent essays have explored synodality and the role of collective lamentations in the life of the church and in ecclesiology. Stephen R. Holmes is Senior Lecturer in Theology in the University of St. Andrews. His recent publications include The Wondrous Cross: Atonement and Penal Substitution in the Bible and History (2007); and Public Theology in Cultural Engagement (2008). Robert W. Jenson has taught theology and philosophy in colleges, universities, and a theological seminary. Most recently, he held the post of Senior Scholar at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton. He is the author of numerous books, including the two-volume Systematic Theology (1997–1999), and most recently commentaries on the Song of Songs and Ezekiel, and Conversations with Poppi about God (2006), transcribed theological exchanges with his (then) 8-yearold granddaughter. He continues to reside in Princeton, New Jersey, where he writes and teaches. Julia A. Lamm is Associate Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She is a historical theologian specializing in the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the doctrine of God, grace, and mysticism. Her

CONTRIBUTORS

ix

publications include The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (1996). She is editor of The Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism (forthcoming) and co-editor of Schleiermacher: Christmas Eve Dialogue and Other Selections (forthcoming). David R. Law is Reader in Christian Thought at the University of Manchester. His books include Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (1993) and Inspiration (2001). He has published extensively in the International Kierkegaard Commentary series and in various learned journals. Ulrike Link-Wieczorek is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Oldenburg. She is a member of the Standing Commission of Faith and Order in the World Council of Churches, and a member of the board of Societas Oecumenica. Her publications include Reden von Gott in Afrika und Asien (1989); Inkarnation oder Inspiration? (1998); and (the co-authored) Nach Gott im Leben fragen (2004). She is also co-editor of Profilierte Ökumene, Festschrift für Dietrich Ritschl zum 80. Geburtstag (2009). James C. Livingston is Walter G. Mason Professor of Religion, Emeritus, at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Religious Thought: The Enlightenment and the 19th Century (2007); and Modern Christian Thought (2006). Gerard Loughlin is Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. His publications include Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (2004); and Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (1996), as well as essays in both the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (1997) and the Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman (2009). Graham McFarlane is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the London School of Theology and is the author of Christ and the Spirit: the Doctrine of the Incarnation according to Edward Irving (1996); Edward Irving: The Trinitarian Face of God (1996); and Why Do You Believe What You Believe about Jesus? (2009). Olga Nesmiyanova is Professor of History of Religion at the Saint-Petersburg School of Religion and Philosophy. She is the author of several works on the history and theology of the Russian church. George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. His books include Thinking about God in an Age of Technology (2005) and The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (2005). He is currently working on a book on God and Being. Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Glasgow, and an honorary Professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has taught at universities in Australia, England, and the United States. He is the author or editor of some 18 books and monographs on literature, religion, and associated disciplines, the most recent of which, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future, was published in 2009. John W. Rogerson is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield. His publications include Myth in Old Testament Interpretation (1974); Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (1985); W. M. L. de Wette, Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography (1992); and The Bible

x

CONTRIBUTORS

and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F. D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith (2009). He has also published extensively in the fields of the social and historical background to the Old Testament, and the use of the Bible in moral and political issues. Frank M. Turner is John Hay Whitney Professor of History and Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where he served as Provost from 1988 to 1992. His publications include John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (2002); Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (1993); The Greek Heritage in Victorian England (1981); and Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (1976). He has also edited John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons (2008); Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (2003); and John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1996).

Preface

The nineteenth century was one of the most diverse and creative periods in the history of Christian theology. Its problems, challenges, and developments continue to be assimilated by theologians today, while its great thinkers – G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Søren Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, et al. – are the subject of intensive international scholarship. The theologies of the nineteenth century can be viewed variously as reactive, creative, and innovative. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had bequeathed a set of problems that continued to preoccupy philosophers and theologians. These included the disputed rationality of religious belief; the status of claims based upon a putative divine revelation, especially with respect to miracles; and a growing awareness of the multiplicity of religions across the world. While recognizing the pertinence of these questions, many later thinkers were deeply dissatisfied with the responses developed by deists and rationalists throughout the preceding century. Their reliance on the traditional arguments for the existence of God was queried. The notion of an essential natural religion that could be identified as the kernel of all historical variants was found to be problematic. And, at the same time, the predominantly dry and cerebral approach to religion did not appear adequate to the affective and spiritual dimensions of life. In much of this reaction to the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant functions as a key transitional figure both in his criticism of the powers of reason and in his attempt to establish religion as an article of moral faith. In his work, however, much of the Enlightenment is affirmed, there being no way back to a premodern era. Despite this intense intellectual scrutiny of the tenets of Christian faith, the churches maintained their powerful social position in the confessional states of Europe while also displaying an impressive vitality in the New World. This ensured that theological work continued to receive the closest attention of some of the greatest thinkers in Europe and North America, not merely those within a

xii

PREFACE

narrowly confined guild but also philosophers, historians, natural scientists, and literary theorists. To some extent, this reflects also the absence of clear demarcation lines between the academic disciplines, at a time prior to the greater specialization and sequestering of subjects that would later characterize university life. It has sometimes been claimed that the primary characteristic of the theologies of the nineteenth century is their stronger historical sense. In many respects, this is borne out by the essays in this collection. Standing at the beginning of the period, Hegel’s philosophy views the divine life as itself unfolding under historical conditions. Perhaps more than any preceding thinker, at least since Augustine, Hegel attempts to discern a philosophical pattern in the fluctuating forces and circumstances of world history. It is not accidental that within the Hegelian school there emerged a tradition of biblical criticism that cast doubt on whether historical study of the Gospels could support, in either theory or practice, the standard doctrinal claims made for Jesus. Schleiermacher also had made a significant contribution to the critical historical study of ancient texts. Despite his attempt to find a solution to the problem of the historical Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, the “faith–history” problem would rumble on well into the twentieth century. At the same time, the search for ways around or through this problem would generate the striking proposals of Kierkegaard, and the different accommodationist strategies found in kenotic Christologies, liberal Protestantism, and Roman Catholic modernism. Developments in the natural sciences also confirmed a keener historical sense. In particular, Darwinism offered an account of the natural world as itself having a history or narrative. Much older than previously surmised, the world was shown to have undergone dramatic changes over the course of millions of years, not least in the evolution of different species amongst which Homo sapiens was a relative latecomer. Other assumptions about the nineteenth century, however, may be called into question. The notion that it witnessed a steady and irreversible ebbing of faith is hardly plausible. While agnosticism, anti-theologies, and heterodox beliefs abounded, this was nevertheless a time of extraordinary religious and spiritual energy. Idealist philosophers, novelists, poets, and political theorists all displayed a religious vitality. Though sometimes far from orthodox, they revealed a sensitivity and awareness often lacking in the tone-deaf criticisms of some of our most vociferous contemporary critics of religion. Similarly, the notion that the theological developments of the nineteenth century were somehow exposed as outmoded and quaint by the thinkers of a later era must also be contested. It is simply too easy to dismiss a theological proposal as “nineteenth century” in much the same way as the media are prone to use the term “medieval.” The essays in this volume reveal that the problems of the nineteenth century are still with us and that many of the lines developed at that time have to be followed. In particular, our own sense of historical context is, if anything, even stronger, and many of the strategies of suspicion that have characterized postmodern writing have their antecedents in writers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. Finally, the assumption that the nineteenth century was a sterile period for the

PREFACE

xiii

development of confessional theologies is also challenged in this volume. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions continued, perhaps surprisingly, to flourish in the hands of leading exponents. This should also caution us from supposing that all the significant developments of the period are to be found in heterodox offshoots of Protestant culture. This collection is offered as a guide to the leading thinkers and trends within Christian theology during the nineteenth century. It acknowledges the important interaction with philosophy, history, literature, and the natural sciences, while also seeking to understand the different social and confessional contexts within which all this took place. It is intended as a guide for senior students and other scholars seeking to find their way into the field, while also registering the latest insights and developments within the study of the period. Throughout the final stages of the project, I have been indebted to my research student Frances Henderson for her excellent contribution as editor, translator, proof reader, and index author. Sadly, the production of this volume was interrupted by the premature death in 2003 of its initial editor, Colin Gunton. His was the original vision, and several of the essays were already completed at the time of his death. However, the present editor is grateful to those who so willingly joined the project at a later stage, as well as for the patience of earlier contributors who revised and awaited the publication of their initial work. This book is offered in grateful memory of Colin Gunton, a friend and theologian much appreciated and often missed. David Fergusson

PART I

Key Thinkers and Their Influence

1 Kant Nicholas Adams

3

2 Schleiermacher Christine Helmer

31

3 Hegel David Fergusson

58

4 Coleridge Stephen R. Holmes

76

5 Kierkegaard David R. Law

97

6 Newman Frank M. Turner

119

CHAPTER 1

Kant Nicholas Adams

Introduction “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxx). This remark, taken from the preface to the second version of the Critique of Pure Reason, is one of Kant’s most famous. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has unparalleled significance for the theology and philosophy of the nineteenth century and beyond. The roles of knowledge and faith are central to that philosophy, a fact that until recently was heavily downplayed by philosophers who investigated epistemology and ethics in ways that ignored theological and historical questions. In this chapter, Kant’s philosophy will be presented in two sections in ways that make his theological commitments explicit. The first section will sketch the shape of Kant’s thinking, and the second will present some of the technical arguments in relation to what are known technically as his theoretical, practical, and aesthetic philosophy. These divisions will be explained in due course. Theologians continue to be interested in Kant today because he transforms certain questions inherited from his predecessors, especially those related to clarifying types of investigation, shifting from intuition to discursive reasoning, attempting to offer a “rational” account of respectable habits of thought and action, exploring the character of human freedom, and reconceiving the relation of philosophy to theology. Kant’s influence extends far beyond his significance for particular subsequent individual thinkers. His thought has left its mark on the shape of the modern state, not least the university, and the place of religious life and theological reflection within it. Kant bequeathed a variety of questions to his successors, including those dealing with the scope of modern investigations in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Questions of religious life and theological topics lie at the heart of all of those investigations. He is best known for his “Copernican Revolution” in epistemology, his

4

NICHOLAS ADAMS

criticism of arguments for the existence of God, his claim that the concept of “God” is an “idea of reason,” and – perhaps most importantly of all – his insistence that persons are autonomous, self-legislating agents who need not and should not rely on the authority of tradition, institutions, and other persons when making judgments. Kant is also credited with or blamed for a number of other inventions, including a division of entities into “noumena” and “phenomena,” distinguishing the “thing in itself ” from “objects of experience,” the claim that consciousness of the “moral law” is a fact of reason, and the development of the notion of “radical evil.” These topics will also be explained in what follows. The principal texts in which these ideas are explored, and which Kant wrote in German, are the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Critique of Judgement (1790), Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant’s interest in questions about God was prompted by wide-ranging changes in European society in the eighteenth century. Developments in natural philosophy (today, natural science) had changed the kinds of investigation thinkers employed when describing the world. Rival or novel claims were tested not only in the customary ways – namely, by consulting the great authorities of the tradition – but also by increasingly refined methods for constructing and testing hypotheses. Claims that had been taken as axiomatic began to be taken as hypotheses. These included the claim that the sun rotates around the earth, or that God exists: claims that came to be treated as hypotheses from the sixteenth century onward. The civil service in Germany had become increasingly important in running the affairs of various princes during and after the Protestant Reformation; it also became increasingly well educated over the course of the eighteenth century. This led to a transformed public sphere in which many questions, hitherto considered inappropriate for public discussion, were hot topics of debate. These topics included the authority of the church, the scope of sovereign power, and the nature of human freedom. These questions became more urgent after the Revolution of 1688 in England, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789. Religious matters were at the heart of these political transformations, and questions of ecclesial authority had themselves become more urgent during the period of reformations from the fourteenth century onward, culminating two hundred years later in the Protestant Reformations in Europe in the sixteenth century. The relatively stable views of natural and social order inherited from classical Greek philosophy were subject to new questions about how best to describe the world. It continued to be taken for granted that there is an analogy between the natural world and the social world, as it had been by the Greeks, but as descriptions of the natural world changed, the nature of that analogy changed too. As debates (about the authority of the Church, for example) grew more intense, questions about how to settle them grew more urgent. What counts as a good argument? How can claims be justified in public debate? What authority does “the public” have? What kinds of investigation are suitable for testing rival claims?

KANT

5

Kant’s work focused and drove these debates in Germany for a brief period of perhaps fifteen years, after which rival figures simultaneously claimed the Kantian heritage for themselves and attempted to correct what they saw as its radical shortcomings. The shape of Kant’s thinking is best appreciated by considering eighteenthcentury transformations in scientific method and in social life, and the relation of these to each other. Kant inherited well-formed questions about them, above all from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704), Gottfried Leibniz (1646– 1716), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Christian Wolff (1679–1754), George Berkeley (1685–1753), David Hume (1711–1776), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Among these questions, and the various answers to them, two pairs of oppositions stand out, which Kant inherited and attempted to overcome. The first pitted “rationalism” against “empiricism”; the second opposed “dogmatism” and “skepticism.” Kant rejected, first, both the “rationalism” of Descartes and Leibniz, and the “empiricism” of Locke and Hume. Although there are significant differences between Descartes and Leibniz, they share an assumption that we have innate (but obscure) ideas, and that the task of philosophy is to clarify them. Although there are significant differences between Locke and Hume, they share an assumption that ideas are (obscure) impressions left by objects, and that the task of philosophy is again to clarify them. Instead of treating philosophy as a battle between rationalists and empiricists, as it had been, Kant indicated that two common assumptions generate both rationalist and empiricist approaches: (a) our knowledge is a matter of clarifying our ideas, whether they are innate or acquired – Kant called this shared assumption “empirical idealism,” because it implies that what we experience is our ideas; and (b) the conditions for our knowledge – what makes that knowledge possible – are objects in the world, whether reflected in innate ideas, or leaving impressions on our minds. Kant called this shared assumption “transcendental realism.” The word “transcendental” here means “the condition under which something is possible.” Kant attempted to correct these assumptions, and called his repairs “empirical realism” and “transcendental idealism.” Empirical realism names the view that what we experience are objects in the world, rather than our ideas of them. Transcendental idealism names the view that the conditions for our knowledge are our ideas, rather than objects in the world. Kant rejected, second, both the dogmatism of Leibniz and Wolff and the criticism of Bayle and Hume. This cluster of arguments centers on the scope of enlightenment. “Enlightenment” is a key term in Kant’s time. It means different things for different thinkers but has at its core the idea that ordinary people should be able to debate freely, in public, the important issues of the day. Leibniz and Wolff, in Germany, had insisted on a “principle of sufficient reason.” This formulation expressed two things. First, there is the claim that everything happens for a reason; second, there is the philosopher’s task to defend such a notion of reason against objections. If anything seems to contradict reason, one can presume that

6

NICHOLAS ADAMS

in fact it does not, and the philosopher should demonstrate this. Bayle in France and Hume in Britain had insisted that there is no convincing way to prove the reason of everything. Hume had further claimed that people’s core beliefs are best described as conventions or habits with particular histories rather than as expressions of an ahistorical reason. The debates here express differing perspectives on order in the world. The rationalists insisted on a prior rational order in the world; the critics denied that such an order could be defended. Kant took both sides to share an important assumption: the task of philosophy is to defend or dispute the discernment of rational order in the world. Kant aimed to correct this assumption by articulating an alternative: the task of philosophy is to defend or dispute claims asserting the rational order of human thinking. Topics such as “cause and effect,” for Kant, do not name questions about whether there is cause and effect in the world, but about what it means for persons to attribute cause and effect in their thinking about the world. This is his transcendental idealism. It can already be seen from these two examples – rationalism/empiricism, and dogmatism/criticism – that Kant attempts to overcome pairs of oppositions. There are many other such pairs, such as materialism/skepticism and mind/ body. In philosophical arguments, once one assumes a split between two things it becomes formidably difficult to avoid unacceptable one-sidedness and almost impossible to show how the two now-separated things are related to each other. Most significant philosophical developments repair the cause of such splits rather than trying to force the split-off elements together, and Kant’s philosophy exemplifies this well. He investigates the rule (the habit of thinking) that generates those pairs, and attempts to repair the rule, not merely the claims that characterize the pairs. He turns to transcendental idealism in order to cure the split between innate ideas and acquired ideas, and to cure the split between reason-in-theworld and its denial; this displays a repair of the causes of the split. Kant’s distinctive turn is away from the structure of “the world” to the structure of “thinking” (more specifically, of “experience”). He calls this his “Copernican Revolution” because of its analogy with the new cosmology. Copernicus had recast many cosmological problems by a turn to a heliocentric model, where planets revolve around the sun. Kant sees himself as recasting many metaphysical problems by a turn to a transcendental-idealist model, where it is the structure of our thinking rather than the structure of the world that needs investigating. In one way, however, Kant’s revolution is significantly anti-Copernican: whereas Copernicus had displaced “us” from the center of the universe (it is now the sun and not our planet that is the center), Kant emphatically placed “us” at the center of knowledge (it is now our thinking and not the world that is the center). Kant’s arguments can be seen as an attempt to save the Enlightenment from self-destruction. The “Enlightenment” names, for Kant, two tendencies in European eighteenth-century intellectual life. The first was to promote the practice of criticism. This meant taking well-established beliefs and examining the evidence for them. It meant converting axioms into hypotheses and constructing tests for them. The second was to widen the scope of explanation. Rather

KANT

7

than seeing clusters of phenomena and associating them with relatively independent clusters of categories and modes of investigation, it became common to try to discern the big picture into which all phenomena can be fitted, accompanied by one overarching mode of explanation. This meant showing that particular events or occurrences were expressions of general laws. Kant understood clearly that the practice of criticism threatens to collapse into skepticism, where no claim can be defended against any other. All inferences rest on axioms, and any axiom can in principle be converted into a hypothesis. This pulls the rug from under any absolute objectivity. The practice of explanation likewise threatens to collapse into materialistic determinism, where every event, including all human action, is the product of natural causes. This pulls the rug from under certain conceptions of human freedom. Kant saw that the search for impregnable axioms concerning the world and attempts to defend human freedom in the light of the laws of causation in the world were doomed, at least in their current form. The turn from “world” to “thinking” was an attempt to relocate assumptions: his axioms would be about thinking; his laws would likewise govern thinking. One can see quickly that this solution creates a new separation between terms: this time between “world” and “thinking.” Over a century earlier, Descartes had famously appealed to a split between world and thinking, but Kant means something different by it, because he sees all claims about “world” as “thinking” dependent. Yet it is a split all the same, and his successors set themselves the task of identifying and repairing the problematic assumption in Kant’s work that causes this split. The philosophical projects of J. G. Fichte and F. D. E. Schleiermacher can fruitfully be viewed as rival forms of repair. Kant’s revolution sets philosophy the task of defending reason and freedom in human thinking. He tends to treat forms of thinking as universal or invariant: as the same at all times and in all places. In contrast to Hume, Kant does not treat either forms of logic (the rules for drawing inferences) or moral maxims (the rules for making ethical judgments) as conventions or habits. Although he addresses the principal philosophical topics as answers to questions about thinking, rather than questions about the world, he reproduces certain rationalist tendencies. Kant treats the structure of thinking, including the structures of moral and creative thinking, as expressions of universal laws. These laws now govern thinking rather than the world, but for Kant they are still universal. He was heavily criticized for this at the time by J. G. Hamann and later again by G. W. F. Hegel. Hamann followed Hume in claiming that patterns of thinking, just as much as discernible patterns in the world, express habits with histories. Hegel developed this further in describing concepts as products of social action, thus reintroducing the dimension of social life that appears almost absent in Kant. Kant’s ahistorical universalism shows itself in his “theoretical” and his “practical” philosophy, and in his remarks about nature, art, the beautiful, and the sublime. The “theoretical philosophy” generally refers to his recasting of debates about the soul, the world, and God along transcendental-idealist (and thus empirical-realistic) lines. The “practical philosophy” refers to his recasting of debates about human

8

NICHOLAS ADAMS

freedom and divine action in the light of consciousness of “the moral law.” In both contexts, Kant ascribes necessity and universality to what Hume called conventions or habits. In his theoretical philosophy, Kant describes concepts as “rules for judgement,” and claims that the “categories” governing such rules are invariant. By “categories,” Kant means the building blocks of formal logic. In the practical philosophy, Kant describes freedom as people’s capacity to legislate their actions for themselves in a reasonable manner, in accordance with “the moral law.” He claims that consciousness of the moral law is a universal “fact of reason.” He also claims that the most basic maxim of all, the “categorical imperative,” applies to all persons at all times in all places. Even more radically, he considers many of the most important moral conventions of his time (especially the practice of telling the truth) to be binding in a way that is universal and invariant. Along with a strong universalism, Kant displays an emphatic individualism. The practice of judgment that lies at the heart of his epistemology has at its core the spontaneity of the irreplaceably individual human subject. At the heart of his moral theory lies the irreplaceably individual responsibility of the human subject. The human subject thinks for itself and is responsible by itself. Institutions, languages, communities, and conventions are all merely shells in which individual agency is contained. Kant has no significant account of institutional agency, linguistically shared horizons, or communal responsibility. Unsurprisingly, his account of the relation of divine and human action – in a word, his understanding of “grace” – has no reference to sacramentality, cooperation, participation, or life of the Spirit, but is merely “something incomprehensible.” His verdict is that we “cannot incorporate it into our maxims for either theoretical or practical use” (Religion 6:53). Put plainly, in the light of the categories he uses and the way he uses them, the role of grace in Kant’s philosophy is almost unrecognizably different from its role in theology in the previous centuries. Kant’s work can thus be understood in terms of three significant presuppositions: (a) appeals to habit do not constitute good reasons for action; (b) individual agents are solely responsible for their free actions (including what they think); and (c) in order to make sense of events in the world, we must treat human action as both naturally caused and freely willed. Taken together, these three presuppositions require a rethinking of forms of argument that rest on memory, history, or habit; of accounts that stress the corporate, social, and historical contexts of meaning and responsibility; and of explanations which insist one-sidedly either on human freedom or on efficient causality as the basis for human action. Kant inherits many habitual practices like care for the vulnerable, imprisonment of criminals, and praise of the virtuous. He sets himself the task of showing how these practices are rational and can thus be justified independently of appeals to history or trust in institutions. The juxtaposition of the new scientific habits of investigation with older habits of consulting eminent authorities, both of which intend to discover the “truth” about the world, leads to contradictions and confrontations of various kinds. Kant sees it as his vocation to adjudicate some of these by adopting an ahistorical perspective.

KANT

9

There are important theological implications which relate to the historical context in which Kant was writing. Prior approaches were generally associated not just with an easily legible cosmic order, but also with an easily legible divine order. God orders the world and God makes it legible to us. This meant that there were many available forms of investigation into the order of things, including looking at things in the world, looking at Scripture, and looking at Church doctrine. Renaissance thinkers a few generations before Kant had often talked of the “book of nature” and the “book of Scripture,” for example. The most widely respected views of order were those that most successfully harmonized investigations into things in the world, Scripture, and Church doctrine. Copernicus himself made no strenuous efforts to harmonize them, and his views in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) were thus treated as not merely unrespectable but also heretical. A century later, one sees increasing extremes. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) argued for a separation between what scripture teaches and what can be learned from philosophy. By contrast, Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) constitutes a well-known English attempt at harmonization between “reason” and “scripture.” In What Is Enlightenment? Kant insists that rationality is properly ascribed to the individual thinker rather than to institutions. Thinking is something one must do for oneself rather than learn from or accept from anyone else. The key words here are “rather than.” Kant does not merely recognize the difference between the irreducibly individual quality of judgment and the unmistakably shared quality of institutional action: he sees them as mutually opposed. This is noticeably unlike Joseph Butler in the generation before Kant, whose Analogy of Religion (1736) insists on the irreducibly individual quality of judgment and the genuine possibility of shared action and responsibility. It is also unlike Friedrich Schleiermacher in the generation after Kant, whose Hermeneutics and Criticism (c. 1828) likewise insists on the shared quality of rule-systems and language and on the individual quality of judgments within them. These two theologians insist on both individual and institutional dimensions in relation to each other. Kant separates them, in a binary opposition, and then associates institutional control of action and thinking with “theology” and individual responsibility and thinking with (his) “philosophy.” Naturally, his own philosophy is deeply theological, in the sense we normally use that word. Many of Kant’s subsequent interpreters do the same. Theologians should thus expect to read accounts of Kant which claim simply that he broke with the theological approaches of his predecessors. Of the many strands associated with this word “theological” as used by Kant’s interpreters, we can discern three. They are related to each other. “Theological” refers, first, to the idea that divine order is readily legible; second, to the enforced demand that there be harmony between the outcomes of investigations into things in the world and into scripture and doctrine; and, third, to the subordination of individual judgment to institutional control. Although it is possible in theology to offer subtle accounts of legibility, to distinguish different forms of inquiry, or to account for the relation

10

NICHOLAS ADAMS

between individual and institutional action, philosophically informed accounts of Kant’s intellectual context often do not reflect this. The word “reason” evidently plays a central role in these discussions. It is worth thinking historically about the term and its scope. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 had established what one might call “minimal rules” for governing relations between religious communities. The failure of political and religious leaders to support the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had led to the Thirty Years War. The minimal rules articulated at its end included the two famous principles that the ruler of a kingdom would determine the religion of his state (whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist), and that minority denominations in those states would be free to worship publicly without harassment. The major thinkers of the period after the Peace of Westphalia – Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz – set themselves the task of formulating these minimal rules more precisely. They sought to discern how members of different traditions could all adopt a common set of rules for public argumentation, for formulating and testing hypotheses, and for interpreting Scripture. At first, these rules presupposed the continuation of distinct traditions. These distinct traditions would continue to have their local customs, their particular practices, their distinctive theologies, and their styles of worship. But they would be able to live together, in the same cities, in peace, because their relations with each other would be governed by a set of minimal rules. These minimal rules were a response to widespread suffering: entire economies had been bankrupted and entire regions had been destroyed by desperate armies. Many of those who had survived armed assault were now picked off by the famine and disease caused by the economic and agricultural collapse. The philosophers mentioned above were, however, not satisfied with minimal rules governing different traditions. These minimal rules were what eventually came to be called “reason.” The philosophers expanded their scope and extended their reach into all areas of life, including theology. When Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert published their Encyclopédie in the 1750s, they explicitly intended to organize all knowledge according to these now far-from-minimal rules. The Encyclopédie famously includes a telling line, “Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian.” It is the contrast between these terms that is significant here. For previous theologians, it was obvious that reason and grace were harmoniously bound up with each other. Now they seem to be competitors. Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) consummated this trend in a most intense fashion: he offered a complete view of religion, rendered in terms of these rules. What had started as “minimal rules” formulated for the sake of peaceful relations between communities had become “maximal reason” which permitted universal claims about everything. What had been conceived to regulate external interactions between communities were now extended to regulate meanings internal to those communities. Whereas the sphere of public interaction (including reasoning about institutions in which more than one tradition played a part) had been governed by minimal rules, there was now an established

KANT

11

project to have the public sphere governed by maximal reason. Scripture was now subservient to these rules, in a quite comprehensive fashion. Instead of being rules whose purpose was restricted to governing the relations between traditions with decisive theological differences, they become – for Kant – rules for governing theological topics themselves, insofar as theological claims can be justified publicly. When Kant appeals to “reason,” he means this in a maximal sense. In summary, before considering the technical details of Kant’s project with an eye on its theological details and implications, we may say that Kant attempts to repair problems he discerns in all his predecessors. He rejects the one-sidedness of rationalism and empiricism and attempts to mitigate the dangers of radical dogmatism and skepticism. He does so in ways that integrate recent insights in natural philosophy and recent trends that question the authority (and indeed agency) of institutions. His model of the human subject is of an individual agent, whose individual thinking is the principal condition for its individual action and of any explanation of that action. In other words, religion will turn out to be a distinctly private and individual matter for Kant.

Theoretical Philosophy The questions that Kant inherits and transforms in the Critique of Pure Reason relate to various forms of inquiry. The most important of these concerns metaphysics. The word “metaphysics” has a confusing history, and as every student of intellectual history quickly discovers, it means different things in different times and places. Aristotle’s Metaphysics (a title he himself did not use, for a number of writings he himself probably did not group together) covers the meaning of the word “being,” the relation between substances and accidents, the prime movers and the gods. In contemporary philosophy, however, “metaphysics” tends to cover such topics as the mind-body problem, free will and determinism, necessity and possibility, and so forth. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant undertakes a critique of metaphysics. Before one can evaluate this critique, one needs to understand quite what metaphysics is for Kant. Kant’s overriding concern is to cure philosophy of reliance on immediate flashes of certainty, which he calls “pure intuitions.” His cure is to describe the discursive process by which persons make judgments about things. Judgments are made about things through the joining together of things we sense (“sensible intuitions”) by following rules for judgment (“concepts”). This process unfolds in time: a person arrives at a judgment after something analogous to deliberation. It is thus not immediate in two ways. First, things are mediated through sense impressions and concepts; and, second, our judgments about them are products of a temporal process. Kant’s insistence that our judgments are outcomes of a fallible process rather than immediate intuitions is one of the most significant shifts in modern philosophy, and no theology after Kant can respectably present itself as other than the outcome of such fallible processes of judgment.

12

NICHOLAS ADAMS

Kant is interested in certain kinds of investigation into certain kinds of object. The most important investigations and objects, which dominate the Critique of Pure Reason, are overtly theological. His critique of metaphysics concerns inquiry into three topics: the soul, the world, and God. Kant calls these “ideas of reason” to distinguish them from “objects of experience.” He poses the following questions. What are objects of the understanding, and what kinds of investigation are appropriate to them? What are ideas of reason, and what kinds of investigation are appropriate to them? What problems arise when one assumes, falsely, that these objects of inquiry are the same, and that the forms of inquiry appropriate to them are also the same? Kant’s critique of metaphysics is thus not most fruitfully considered a critique of the kinds of investigation that characterize Aristotle’s inquiries in Metaphysics. His approach rather resembles Aristotle’s in certain respects. The focus of his inquiry is the philosophy which precedes him and which investigates the soul, the world, and God in various ways, not least through appeal to “metaphysics.” Before one can evaluate this inquiry, one needs to understand who these predecessors are, and what kinds of inquiry they conduct. Kant inherits questions from Leibniz about what the soul does in relation to perception, what the world is compared to individual things, and how the world is ordered by God. He also inherits questions about the existence of the soul, the existence of the world (in a particular sense), and the existence of God; he also inherits widely accepted proofs for God’s existence. Leibniz’s questions about the soul were intended to answer materialist views (like those of Hobbes) which considered human agents as machines. Leibniz argued that to talk of a soul is to talk of something unified, whereas a machine is only ever composite or an aggregate. A soul is something singular and “simple” in the technical medieval sense: it is not divisible into parts, but is one thing. When the soul perceives, it unifies its perceptions. Leibniz’ questions about the soul were also intended to answer dualist views which considered human agents as divided into two wholly different substances – thinking substance and material substance (as Descartes had claimed). For Leibniz, a soul is unified, indivisible, and not extended in space. Kant insists that questions about what the soul “does” can be separated from questions about what the soul “is.” Like Leibniz, Kant rejects the dualism and materialism of Descartes and Hobbes. Like Leibniz, Kant is deeply interested in how the manifold of perceptions is unified by the thinking subject. Unlike Leibniz, Kant claims it is not fruitful to treat the soul as if it were an object in the world like the objects which the soul perceives. Kant’s argument, in the Critique of Pure Reason, is that talk about the soul is talk about how the thinking subject unifies its perceptions, how the subject’s unity persists in time, and how change is registered by something constant in thinking. Such talk is quite appropriate, he thinks. However, for Kant, it is misleading to think that the soul is a thing, that it is an object, and that it can be described or investigated. It is misleading to say that we “have” souls, in the same sense that we have hands. Hands are objects in the world; souls are not. For Kant it is quite understandable – and desirable – that we should

KANT

13

describe the thinking subject’s unification of its perceptions; indeed he uses Leibniz’s technical term “apperception” to describe this. The conclusion that there is some “thing” responsible for that unification is an illusion, however. Similar considerations apply to “the world” and “God.” By “the world,” Kant and his predecessors do not mean (as we mean in common speech) the planet Earth. They mean that which contrasts with individuals: it is the whole of things. The world is the totality of objects, considered as a unity. This unity has much in common with the unity of the soul. Leibniz distinguishes between the world considered as the totality of things, and the world considered as the totality of all possible things, and he attributes greater reality to the latter. Kant says of the world what he says of the soul. It is sometimes appropriate and desirable to think of the totality of things as a unity. It is an illusion to think of this unity as a thing. It is not a thing: thinking about “the world” is a way of thinking about how things are unified for us as thinking subjects. The appearance of God in this kind of discussion is at first sight rather puzzling. Why should the creator of all things, the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, or the Holy Trinity, appear in a discussion about metaphysics? The short answer is that this God doesn’t, quite. Kant, inheriting a series of debates from Spinoza and Leibniz, is not primarily thinking about God in relation to the Bible or to worship, but to the deus sive natura (God/ Nature) of Spinoza or the ens realissimum (most real being) of Scholastic philosophy. Leibniz is greatly interested in God as creator in a way that Kant is not; whereas Leibniz considers the ways in which order in the world relates to God’s activity as creator, Kant is more interested in what kind of unifying role a particular notion or ideal, “God,” plays for the thinking subject. Just as the soul is a way of talking about how the subject unifies its perceptions, and the world is a way of talking about how everything that there is can be considered as a unity or totality, so God is a way of talking about the totality of possible judgments about objects. The ens realissimum is the unity of thinkable objects and their possible predicates. Just as the unity of the thinking subject should not be reified into a “soul,” and the unity of appearances should not be reified into a “world” that is an object, so the unity of objects of thought in general should not be reified into a “God” that is a thing. A pattern is emerging. Kant’s critique of metaphysics is a critique of ways of talking about the unification of particulars by and in thought. The “soul,” the “world,” and “God” are not arbitrarily chosen topics. The kinds of unification they represent are the three basic kinds of unification performed by human thought. They are, moreover, ways of thinking about unification, rather than naming things that exist. Kant does not merely seek to identify the illusion of thingness or thinghood that attaches to the “soul,” the “world,” and “God.” He is also interested in the kinds of investigation that accompany them. It is obvious that he encourages and indeed conducts sophisticated investigations of his own. His point is that one must recognize different kinds of investigation and not confuse them. Things in the world call for a certain kind of investigation. There were two available

14

NICHOLAS ADAMS

models for investigation in Kant’s time: natural philosophical investigation (what in English we call “science”) and historical investigation. Both were candidates as a paradigm for scientific thinking in the eighteenth century. David Hume chose historical investigation; Kant chose natural philosophy. Because of this choice he confronted a problem. It was obvious to him that natural philosophy cannot be the model for thinking about unity, because natural philosophy investigates particulars rather than their totality. Kant thus articulated a different kind of investigation which he called “transcendental philosophy.” For Kant, it is vital not to confuse the two kinds of investigation. To investigate God as if God is an existing object on the model of natural philosophy, or to try to prove the existence of God using arguments that belong in natural philosophy, is to produce illusion. Other investigations, however, are quite appropriate. To investigate how it is that the unity of objects of thought in general functions in our ways of thinking is highly desirable. The important thing is not to mistake one kind of investigation for another. Just as Aristotle distinguished investigations looking at things in the world and investigations into being qua being, so Kant distinguishes natural philosophy and transcendental philosophy. In Aristotle’s works, the latter kind of investigation is called “Metaphysics,” but for Kant “metaphysics” means something rather different: it means forms of inquiry which confuse “things” with “unity.” With respect to “things,” Kant has in mind two deficient modes of philosophical investigation. The first he associates with Locke. It is the tendency to treat sensible conditions for human knowing as if they are conditions for objects’ existence. In other words, epistemic conditions (sense) are mistaken for ontic conditions (being). It is falsely claimed that sense directly reveals things. Kant’s cure for this is to show the limits of sensibility: it is this function that “noumena” discharge, as we shall see. The second he associates with Leibniz. It is the tendency to treat intellectual conditions for human knowing as if they are the conditions for objects’ existence. In other words, epistemic conditions (concepts) are mistaken for ontic conditions (being). It is falsely claimed that our ideas directly reveal things. Kant’s cure for this is to show that concepts must link up with sense, in a fallible process, rather than assume they are already in preestablished harmony. While Kant’s approach may sound defensible, there is something odd from the perspective of a later reader. The range of meanings of “soul,” “world,” and “God” are much wider, in the long tradition, than merely the unity of the thinking subject, of appearances, and of objects of thought in general. When we speak of someone as “soulless” or the world as “creation” or of God as “creator,” it is not at all obvious that unities (of any kind) are in view, nor that such usages are mistaken. There are other connections between these terms. The soul might be thought of as a point of contact or some kind of analogy with divine action. The world is created by the creator. The soul, the world, and God might be thought of as in an economy of grace. These are respectable uses, and it is not obvious when reading medieval or modern theology that they are riddled with illusion or confusion over modes of investigation. It is thus important to notice that Kant’s

KANT

15

critique of metaphysics involves a contraction of the range of meanings and usages of the key terms under discussion, and that this range is narrower than it is in Leibniz – for example, where Leibniz speaks of God as creator. The interpreter of Kant thus requires some subtlety. On the one hand, Kant makes significant headway in overcoming the one-sidedness of Locke and Leibniz. Neither sense (Locke) nor concepts (Leibniz) are by themselves enough to produce judgments of the form “This x is a y.” For these prior thinkers, we do not need to judge it at all, because in a sense we already know that this x is a y. Kant produces an account of judgment in which concepts must be combined with sense. Indeed, Kant calls concepts “rules for judgement,” and sense “conditions for understanding.” The Critique of Pure Reason has, as one of its important tasks, an account of how the human agent spontaneously treats sense data using concepts, in a fallible process that yields judgments that may be true or false. Human judgments (a) are the product of a process and (b) should not be mistaken for truths about the world. Kant thus attempts to cure habits of thought which treat judgments as immediate intuitions of truth. On the other hand, Kant displays an emphatic tendency to ignore well-established ways of thinking about the soul, and about God in particular, in favor of significantly narrowed concepts. The effect is that certain topics, such as the relation between divine creativity and human action, largely disappear from view. Leibniz had wondered, in 1714, what the relationship between nature and grace looked like when considered with modern categories of thought, especially the notion of the unifying “I.” Seventy years later, Kant displays almost no interest in this question. Many theologians consider that Kant’s claim that God is only an “idea of reason” is one of his most serious shortcomings. This is perhaps to ignore the bigger problem. Kant’s view that God is an idea of reason is a consequence of shrinking the scope of “God” to the ens realissimum, and then glossing the latter as the unity of all possible objects and their predicates. Kant acquires this usage from the late Scholastics and above all from Spinoza. For the Scholastics (roughly speaking, thinkers who came before Descartes), this way of speaking was one of many ways of talking about God. For Kant, in this context, it comes to exhaust what “God” means. If Kant is merely claiming that this unity is an “idea of reason,” there is little cause for complaint. When this unity is named “God,” however, and when the scope of this term shrinks significantly, certain important theological questions become meaningless, and it is the accompanying disappearance of the question of the relationship between nature and grace that should motivate the theologian’s most serious complaints. It is in the light of this kind of interpretation that one makes best sense of Kant’s remarks about the “thing in itself ” and the infamous split between “noumena” and “phenomena.” When Kant is discussed by theologians, these technical terms often play a central role. It is important to remember that Kant is trying to repair the one-sidedness of “empirical idealism” and “transcendental realism.” Empirical idealism is the claim that the only thing we have immediate access to is our ideas. This is commonly associated with Descartes. Transcendental realism is the claim

16

NICHOLAS ADAMS

that how things appear to us is how they really are. This is commonly associated with a wide variety of pre-critical philosophers, including Leibniz and Hume. Both rationalist (Leibniz) and empiricist (Hume) philosophies fail to consider that how things appear to us might be distinguished from how they really are. Kant claims that we can consider an object in two ways. We can consider it independently of how we cognize it, or we can consider it as it appears to us when we judge sensible intuitions by means of concepts. When we consider an object as it appears to us, we have at least three distinct aspects in play. There are the sensible intuitions, the concepts, and the act of judgment. Sensible intuitions can be distorted (our eyesight may require correction); concepts can be poorly grasped (we may need to learn the rules better); judgment can slip up (we may need to learn to be better judges – something Kant thinks is formidably difficult, if not impossible). There is ample room for error, and any particular mistake may be the consequence of a problem with any one of these aspects, or some combination of problems. When we consider an object independently of our judgment, none of these aspects is in play. No sense data are available (because there is no subject to sense); no concepts are available (because there is no rule-following agent); no judgment is made (because there is no judge). To consider an object in this way, “as it is in itself,” is very minimal. How should one interpret Kant here? Perhaps he is saying that there are two objects. There is a “thing in itself,” which we cannot know, and there is an appearance, which we can know. On such a two-object or “two-world” view, Kant’s task will be to show how these two objects relate to each other. Worse still, Kant will need to explain how he knows that we cannot know the thing in itself, and how he knows where to draw the limits on what we can and cannot know. But perhaps he is saying that there is only one object, but it is considered in two ways. Or it can be thought of “as it is in itself,” independently of sense, concept, and judgment. It can be thought of “as it appears,” as the product of sense, concept, and judgment. On such a “two-aspect” view, Kant’s task will be to show that thinking of objects as they appear is not identical to thinking of objects independently of how they appear. Kant’s strongest critics tend to attribute a two-world view to him; his strongest defenders tend to attribute a two-aspect view. The matter cannot be settled by brute appeal to his texts, as Kant offers material to support both interpretations. In this chapter, I have assumed that the two-aspect view produces a richer and more defensible interpretation of Kant. This question is, however, crucial for theology, as discussions of the thing in itself lay the foundation for denying – as Kant does – that we can “know” God. Similar considerations apply to the terms “noumena” and “phenomena.” Again, Kant’s concern is to cure the philosopher of one-sidedness, whether rationalist or empiricist. There are objects of knowledge: these are the products of sense data judged according to concepts. There are also ideas of reason: these are products of thinking that arise almost naturally because of how we reason. Kant distinguishes between “understanding” and “reason” in this connection. Understanding is the product of sense data, concepts, and judgment.

KANT

17

The philosopher can pay attention, however, to the principles at work in such understanding. There is a pattern to how we judge sense data according to concepts, and these patterns or principles can be mapped or codified. This mapping or codification Kant calls “reason.” As concepts are to understanding, so principles are to reason. Concepts are rules for judgment (of sense data). Principles are patterns of understanding. Understanding unifies appearances. Reason unifies rules of understanding. In other words, understanding orders our perceptions, whereas reason orders our thinking. It is in this debate that the phenomenon and noumenon belong. Kant insists that “knowledge” is a matter of understanding, not of reason. To know is to know an object by judging sense data by means of concepts. Reason displays the patterns of knowing, but it does not yield knowledge itself. We can juggle concepts, clarify concepts, map concepts, order concepts, and so forth. But this (quite legitimate) activity is distinct from knowing things. Where there are sense data judged according to concepts, the products are phenomena. Where there are concepts considered independently of sense data, that is, where there are no judgments to be made, the products are noumena. A noumenon is a product of reason. The “thing in itself ” is a noumenon; so is the soul, and so is God. In each case sense data are lacking, and no object appears. Indeed, the confusion of the “thing in itself,” or the soul, or God with an object of knowledge is precisely the problem that sections of the Critique of Pure Reason seek to solve. Kant does not reject noumena in favor of phenomena. He rejects conflating them. Considering noumena draws attention to the problems that arise when one tries to conjure knowledge out of reflection on how agents think. Put differently, noumena might best be viewed as a teaching aid or a therapeutic tool rather than a class of object in the world or representations in the mind. Because noumena are products of thinking independently of sense data, the only way one could “know” a noumenon would be through direct intellectual intuition. However, as Kant insists tirelessly, humans do not have direct intellectual intuition. We judge sense data using rules/concepts. For us, knowledge is a fallible process and if we have flashes of insight, those flashes are not immediately self-confirming. More importantly, we only have “knowledge” (in Kant’s sense) of a sensible object. We don’t “know” concepts or products of reason, although we use them when we know “things.” Kant’s critiques of arguments for the existence of God are also best viewed in this light. Kant’s root objection is to intellectual intuition: to any claim that one has immediate knowledge of an object independent of its being determined as an object by the subject, through the synthesis of sense data and concepts. Any process which produces an object of knowledge is either an act of the understanding or an illusion caused by the exercise of reason. Proofs for the existence of God are exercises of reason, in Kant’s sense, and they claim to produce objects of knowledge. They are thus illusions, for Kant. It is vital to appreciate what questions and answers Kant takes the classic proofs for the existence of God to pose and provide. The ontological, cosmological, and design arguments do not ask the question “Does God exist?” but “Can God’s existence be inferred?” Their

18

NICHOLAS ADAMS

answers are, in each case, “yes,” but with different reasonings. The ontological argument takes many forms; Kant is concerned with the argument associated with Descartes and Leibniz. The argument goes like this: 1. Existence is a perfection (it makes something so good that it cannot be made better). 2. The ens realissimum is the most perfect being, by definition. 3. The ens realissimum is possible. 4. Therefore, the ens realissimum is actual. The first three claims are premises; the fourth claim is a logical inference. If the ens realissimum did not exist, this would mean that it was not perfect (which contradicts 2), because to be perfect is to exist (which follows from 1). To tackle this argument, one has to either reject one of the premises or expose the inference as fallacious. Kant rejects the first premise. He denies that “being” is a real predicate. It is important to note that Kant does not deny that being is a predicate: he affirms that being is indeed a predicate. He denies it is a real predicate. “Real” here has a technical meaning. There are two kinds of predicate in play here, “real” predicates and “logical” predicates. A real predicate is a property which makes something what it is. If I say, “The tomato is red” or “The tomato is yellow,” the predicates red and yellow make the tomato what it is: a red or a yellow tomato. Red and yellow are real predicates. If I say, “The red tomato is possible” or “The yellow tomato exists,” the predicates “is possible” and “exists” do not make the red or yellow tomatoes what they are. “Possible” and “existing” are logical predicates. They are “modal,” relating to possibility, actuality, and necessity. If it is objected that logical predicates are real predicates, then “The tomato is red and exists” has two real predicates, “red” and “exists”: these make the red existing tomato what it is, and that would mean that the red tomato exists necessarily. Most proponents of the ontological argument do not claim that red tomatoes exist necessarily. To do so would be to do away with modal logic completely, because there would no longer be any point talking about possibility, actuality, and necessity. Everything that exists would exist necessarily, and everything that does not exist would necessarily not exist. Proponents claim that only God exists necessarily. As a result, in Kant’s view, they must admit that the first premise does not hold true in all cases. Once the first premise is withdrawn or qualified, the argument collapses. Kant’s critiques of the cosmological and design arguments are also closely woven into his account of cognition. They will not be rehearsed in detail here. The main point is that both the cosmological and design arguments fail to observe Kant’s rule that what one can say about the world of sense and judgment cannot unproblematically be transplanted to the world of principles and reason. Both arguments engage in precisely that transplantation, and are thus strongly to be resisted. In addition, the cosmological argument is held to depend on the definition of the ens realissimum. The ontological argument starts with it. The cosmological

KANT

19

argument finds its way to it – at the point where it tries to identify the necessarily existing first cause with the ens realissimum. If one were to think about names of God rather than concepts of God (where concepts “capture” their object), the proof (and Kant’s critique) might look rather different. It is vital to remember that Kant is not criticizing the claim “God exists.” He is denying that the claim “God exists” can be defended using formulae such as the ontological and cosmological arguments. As with nearly all his transcendental arguments, Kant is interested primarily not in the truth of statements, but in whether they can be mounted convincingly in public. As we shall see, Kant strongly believes the claim “God exists” can be defended publicly in the context of moral reasoning. It is the arguments Kant contests, not the truth of the claims. Kant’s critiques of the proofs for the existence of God are part of his transcendental idealist cure for the errors that arise when one treats reason as the same as the understanding. He is interested in varieties of “transcendental illusion” rather than in questions of God’s existence per se. This is why he refers elsewhere to unconditioned necessity as reason’s “true abyss.” This is an arresting description. One may wonder whether Kant thinks there really is this abyss, and reflection on God shows the point where reason breaks down; or whether he thinks that transcendental errors lead one into various muddles, and the fact that faulty reasoning leads to an abyss is a sign that something needs repairing. It is perhaps the scope of Kant’s terms, rather than his arguments, that should arouse the theologian’s suspicion. Kant never argues for his account of God as ens realissimum. It is a technical term he inherits, and he simply chooses not to consider any richer set of descriptions, or more imaginative names, of God. Put slightly differently, it may be Kant’s presuppositions, not his demonstrations, that produce theological difficulties. If that is so, the most appropriate theological responses will not primarily be a question of exposing fallacious arguments or weak chains of reasoning, but will involve identifying problematic presuppositions, and repairing them. When Kant says that we cannot “know” God, he means that God is not a phenomenon. There are no sense data to be judged according to a concept or rule that produces the claim “This object is God.” Yet it is striking that this sense of “knowing” God is distinct from the senses of knowing God that are rehearsed in patterns of prayer and worship. Kinds of knowing associated with friendship, relationship, trust, service, imitation, participation, and the discernment of God’s action in history are not forbidden or ruled out by Kant’s metaphysical strictures. They simply do not appear at all. Thus, if Kant says, “There is no knowledge of God,” and his theological colleague says, “There is knowledge of God,” the meaning of “knowledge” may be equivocal in the two cases. If Kant says, “There is no experience of God,” and his theological colleague says, “There is experience of God,” the meaning of “experience” may likewise be equivocal. To insist that there is knowledge of God or experience of God in Kant’s sense is not meaningless; it would, however, be a novel claim quite different from the claims made by prior theologians about what it means to know God.

20

NICHOLAS ADAMS

Practical Philosophy In the Groundwork, the Critique of Practical Reason, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant poses a series of moral questions. As well as the antique question “How should I act?” Kant asks, “How do I morally justify my acts?” As well as the question “Am I free?” Kant asks, “How do I justify my assumption that I am free?” Once again, questions of public justification come to the fore. It is important to note that Kant did not have a differentiated notion of the public. He did not investigate the possibility that there are different publics and different groups within them. It is not a feature of Kant’s work to ask, “In what ways are these claims directed primarily to this particular group?” or “How might these claims properly be viewed as convincing by these people but unconvincing to those people?” Instead, Kant conceives of a single and unified public, made up of rational souls, for whom an argument is either valid or invalid. A claim either is or is not defensible in public. Kant’s approach to moral reasoning has two striking features. First, it refuses any notion that the moral worth of actions is decided on the basis of their outcomes. Kant flatly denies that we can judge whether an action is good by looking at the effects it has. Second, it is uncertain about the place of the Aristotelian virtues in the moral life. This is perhaps because the classical virtues seem to vary between social groups: the virtues appropriate to the prince are different from the virtues appropriate to the farmer. Kant desires a moral theory that applies invariantly to all finite, rational agents. Instead of adopting either consequentialism or virtue ethics, as they are known today, he focuses on the meaning of “duty.” Kant inherits this term from a long history of ethics but gives it a distinctive twist: duty is expressed in my free and rationally motivated adoption of certain universal maxims. Kant rules out in advance answers to questions about freedom that are “theological” in his restricted sense. I cannot rely on authoritative persons or powerful institutions to teach me how to act, and I cannot appeal to God’s will because there is no available “philosophical” (i.e., public, and potentially universally acceptable) justification for any particular interpretation of God’s will. Kant perhaps implies that disagreements over the interpretations of Scripture are typically adjudicated by institutions in ways that severely relegate individual judgment to a lower level. Given Kant’s commitment to individual action as the paradigm of all action, such appeal to authorities is ruled out. Considered from the perspective of Kant’s “theoretical” (as opposed to “practical”) philosophy, persons are not free. We rightly regard events in the world of objects as the causes and effects of other such events. If persons are such objects, their actions too are rightly regarded as causes and effects. Kant acknowledges this but suggests that theoretical philosophy is an account and justification of one of two possible ways of looking at the world. The theoretical philosophy

KANT

21

needs to be supplemented with a practical philosophy which is committed to justifying the claim that human beings are free and committed to answering questions about what such free (but finite) persons ought to do. It is obvious to Kant that if humans are not free, then there can be no meaningful talk of morality. There is meaningful talk of morality, and so it is the task of the philosopher to defend the reality of human freedom. Kant claims we do (and must) take ourselves to be free. This assumption is a “practical necessity.” Accompanying this assumption is a characterization of human action as the practice of following maxims, or rules for action. Although we have various inclinations, these do not “cause” our actions. Instead, we follow maxims. These maxims, in turn, cannot be imposed from outside. Instead, we freely choose to adopt certain maxims. The structure of this argument is noteworthy. If I am to conceive of myself as an agent (indeed, as an original source of actions), rather than an effect of causes, I must conceive of myself as free. I do conceive of myself as an agent; therefore, I must conceive of myself as free. Kant does not set out to prove that I am free. Rather, he sets himself the task of showing what public justification I might offer for assuming that I am free. “If I do not assume that I am free, then I must deny certain things that I do not, in fact, deny.” This does not prove that I am free, but it explains why I assume my freedom. For Kant, this free agent who adopts maxims is “self-legislating.” But how do I justify the maxims that I choose? If I refuse to justify them, it is doubtful, for Kant, that my actions can be properly described as moral. It may be that I form for myself a representation of the moral law, and act on that representation, but how do I justify that representation? Put differently, are there any generally valid maxims, and if there are, what are they? Kant makes a distinction here between maxims whose imperatives are valid “hypothetically” and those that are valid “categorically.” A hypothetical imperative has an “If … then …” structure. If I wish to learn from a lecture, then I must pay attention to it. This kind of maxim is only valid when the “if ” part is accepted. A categorical imperative, by contrast, has an unconditional structure: it is universally valid. In the Groundwork Kant asks, “Are there any categorical imperatives?” “Are there any maxims that are valid at all times, in all places, in all circumstances?” Kant claims that there is at least one such maxim, and it is related to two of his other claims: that the only unconditional good is a good will; and that I must presuppose that there is a moral law. A maxim is unconditionally valid if it expresses simultaneously an unconditionally good will and a conformity with the moral law whose validity I legislate for myself. Each part of this chain of reasoning rules out any appeal to external authorities, or to external criteria such as the desirability or undesirability of the outcomes of my actions. In the Groundwork, Kant offers different formulations for the categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law,” and “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” These two

22

NICHOLAS ADAMS

formulations mean much the same thing. It is interesting, however, that Kant offers two versions, one in the second person and the other in the first person. It is almost as if Kant is undecided whether an unconditional claim is best expressed as a claim made of myself by me, or a claim made by me upon you. Both versions share a focus on the act of willing and on the notion of a universal law. Both versions insist, on the one hand, that the categorical imperative makes a claim on you/me; and, on the other hand, that you/I will it freely. There are many tangles here. The categorical imperative is contextless, yet applies in all contexts. It makes a claim, but the claim is only binding on you/ me because you/I make the claim your/my own. To own the claim requires only an act of reflection, but such reflection also incorporates motivations: the person who obeys it also wills it. This is a curious kind of obedience that is at the same time a kind of autonomy. The tangles are perhaps not of Kant’s invention. They arise because the moral languages Kant inherits are overwhelmingly oriented to obedience, whether it is Israel’s obedience to the Lord, Jesus’ obedience to the Father, Paul’s obedience to Jesus, or the tragic conflict between Antigone’s obedience to the state and to her family. A moral account that has no language of obedience is arguably not a moral account at all. Kant’s era embodies the contradictions of striving for obedience to something other than one’s whims at the same time as asserting a person’s self-legislating agency. Kant’s solution is to use the language of obedience in such a way as to make it do the work of describing autonomy. He asserts that the moral law is identical to the law that I legislate for myself. The law is both mine (I author it for myself) and not mine (it is already there, before I author it for myself). Again, this is an identity I must presuppose if I am to make sense of myself as a human agent, rather than an identity I can demonstrate with proofs. One often noted problem with the categorical imperative is that it is purely formal. While it offers a universally applicable principle for choosing maxims, it does not tell me explicitly which particular maxims to choose. Does it completely lack any content? Kant answers this question with what looks like a non sequitur: the human agent is not only a means to an end, but also an end in itself. It has, in a word, “dignity.” This is, however, not quite the non sequitur it appears to be. Kant’s argument is structured a bit like a musical rondo: it keeps coming back to the central question of what it means to be free in the face of models of natural philosophy that see only cause and effect in the world of things. Kant has a variety of answers to this question. There is “rational” causation as well as “natural” causation. There is a “practical necessity” to assume freedom as well as a “theoretical necessity” to assume cause and effect. And, with these distinctions in mind, he insists that while things can be thought of as means, persons must be thought of as ends. This is one of the most influential of all Kant’s moral ideas. It lies behind Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on treatment in times of war of wounded combatants, prisoners of war, and civilians (first adopted 1864); behind the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); and behind the

KANT

23

preamble to the United Nations Convention against Torture (1984). Each refers to the dignity of the human person using language first used by Kant. Kant introduces the idea of human dignity in order to give some content to the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” Kant does not say that persons should be treated as ends instead of means; he says that when they are treated as means, they should also be treated as ends. It is a “Both … and …” formulation. The moral languages Kant inherited were not only shaped by notions of obedience and the image of God. They were – because of these shapes – also profoundly social and (in the forms inherited from Aristotle) focused on questions of character and virtue. Human action is a shared business undertaken for the common good. Although Kant struggled very hard with this, as one can see from his emphatic individualism in matters of agency and responsibility, he nevertheless did not wholly expunge it. A social vision reappears in the light of his arguments about means and ends. In the Groundwork, he suggests that the requirement to treat every person as an end leads to an ideal (in his technical sense) of a “kingdom of ends” in which all participate. Likewise, in Religion, Kant describes a moral duty for all persons to enter an “ethical commonwealth” consisting of those who obey/author the moral law for themselves. Since the language of “participation” and “cooperation” is rare in Kant, these cases are noteworthy. Kant makes a further distinction between mere free choice (Willkür) and genuinely free will (Wille), a distinction that also leads to an account of social life. Mere free choice denotes our ability to adopt maxims; genuinely free will denotes the fact that we author the moral law itself for ourselves. There is something asocial about free choice: one can imagine isolated persons pursuing their own goals. Free will refers, by contrast, to a shared moral law, even if each person must author it for him- or herself. As with the language of obedience, Kant took up the languages of character and virtue, although, once again, he transformed them in radical ways. Kant talks of disposition (Gesinnung) in connection with character and a kind of choice of disposition in connection with virtues. The shadow of this choice of disposition is the refusal by persons to make this choice. Kant calls this refusal “radical evil.” For Kant, a person can either choose a right disposition, and obey the moral law, or choose something else, thus displaying a propensity toward radical evil. Evil here is not a privation of the good, as it is in Patristic theology. For Kant, to choose to obey the moral law is good. To choose not to obey it is evil. This too has been immensely influential, to such an extent that any discussion of Patristic accounts of evil in the classroom often have to start with something like Kant’s account in order to show how different, and how alien, the account of evil as privatio boni sounds to modern ears. If traditional theological formulations sound strange to modern ears, Kant’s formulations should nonetheless sound strange to theologians. This is partly because they seem to be curious parodies of previous theological patterns of

24

NICHOLAS ADAMS

thought, especially the relations between divine grace and human action, or between divine foreknowledge and human freedom. In place of a primary relation between God and humanity, the focus is on a harmony between a law that is simultaneously already authored and authored de novo by the agent. These parodies are not intentional. In Kant’s answer to the question as to what it is about the human person that confers dignity, there is a parody of the human person as imago dei – the image of God in the first chapter of the book of Genesis. In Genesis the image of God is associated with dominion over creation, and with being male and female. For Kant, the dignity of the person arises from his or her capacity for autonomous action. Enlightenment categories are superimposed on inherited shapes of moral reasoning, and it is not surprising that in Religion, Jesus should appear as a mere model of moral action, rather than the one who reconciles creator and creation. It is also perhaps not surprising that God constantly reappears in the practical philosophy, not as the one who reveals and transforms, but as a postulate of reason: something whose existence one “must” assert if one upholds the moral law. (For Kant, it is unthinkable that anyone would not uphold the moral law.) In the case of the “choice of disposition,” this parody of theological topics is particularly striking. Whereas Aristotle’s account of virtues in Nicomachean Ethics stresses the learned quality of character and virtues, Kant reproduces the shape of justification by faith: it is a kind of all-encompassing and sudden decision to choose a disposition, independent of the kinds of “works” that establish and reinforce habits. Finally, the account of radical evil is a parody of the relation between divine grace and human sin, of the goodness of creation and the failure of creatures to fulfill their creatureliness. Since Augustine’s antiPelagian writings, it had been taken for granted in theology that human action is insufficient to attain salvation. Humans need divine help. Kant struggled to make sense of divine grace. Although he claims simply to ignore it, in his account of radical evil he arguably denies it. Kant’s talk of divine help is heavily distorted by his emphatic individualism, and this leads to distorted accounts of the absolution and transformation of the sinner. For Kant, there is primarily the one who hopes for happiness or the one who deserves punishment. Questions of reconciliation seem almost absent. Just as in the theoretical philosophy, it is Kant’s assumptions and his narrowing of terms in the practical philosophy that cause difficulties for theology after Kant. A radical insistence on individual responsibility (with glimpses of social life), combined with an account of an overwhelming human autonomy (with glimpses of obedience) and the absence of any theologically recognizable discussion of divine grace, raises almost insuperable difficulties for any Christian theology that wishes to be traditional and “Kantian.” Kant’s developments can partly be explained as expressions of changing social relations in eighteenthcentury Europe, with the erosion of trust in institutional authorities and ever more shrill appeals to divine authority to compensate for that eroding trust. It is equally plausible to suggest that Kant faced certain contradictions in social life, contradictions produced by shifting balances of social and political power,

KANT

25

and he expressed them in ways that did not see those contradictions as the outcomes of particular histories; instead, he persisted in reproducing forms of rationalism stemming from Descartes, seeking universal and invariant structures in moral life. An appeal to memory or habit was not for Kant a respectable reason that could justify one’s beliefs or one’s practices. The freedom to forget what these warrant meant that the complexities of topics – the memories in the tradition – such as the soul, or grace, or evil could be left to one side or radically reinterpreted. Kant did not know enough theology to repair it. In any case, he seemed to view theology as an expression of authorities who sought to impose their alien will on agents whose vocation was autonomous agency. It is perhaps for this reason that he suggested theology be replaced by philosophy in matters of scientific or moral inquiry – philosophy seemed a discipline better suited to formulating claims that can be justified in public.

Aesthetics Having considered in the Critique of Pure Reason how truth claims are to be tested publicly, and having considered in Groundwork, the Critique of Practical Reason, and Metaphysics of Morals how moral claims are to be tested publicly, Kant considered in the Critique of Judgement how claims about beauty and the sublime are to be tested publicly. Like the others, these discussions have a significant relation to, and bearing upon, theological topics. Drawing on the writings of Burke, Kant was concerned to make sense of judgments of taste, of beauty, and of the sublime. In his earlier thinking, Kant has assumed that judgments of this kind must be purely individual, and not subject to public justification: you have your tastes and I have mine. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant displays a change of view. Judgments of beauty are understood in this later work to express claims that command universal assent in ways that have a strong analogy with moral claims. Kant recognizes that when someone claims, “This is beautiful,” he or she may well be expressing an individual judgment, but the latter also invites and expects agreement from others. The claim “This is beautiful” is universal in a way that “I find this agreeable” is not. Kant’s investigations into aesthetics concern what this universal dimension might be. Kant distinguishes between two kinds of judgment. On the one hand, there is the judgment that is familiar from the Critique of Pure Reason. The concept is given, and in the act of judgment I apply that concept to a particular. Kant calls this “determinant judgement.” On the other hand, a contrasting type of judgment is identified. The particular is given, and in the act of judgment I seek the concept which applies to it. Kant calls this “reflective judgement.” Questions of beauty and the sublime present an interesting case for Kant. (In what follows I will consider aesthetic responses to the natural world rather than art in order to avoid troublesome questions relating to Kant’s different handling of nature and art. These questions deserve detailed consideration, but here

26

NICHOLAS ADAMS

it must suffice to say that Kant implies that natural phenomena offer purer experiences of aesthetic judgment than artistic products. This is because art has a humanly contrived purpose, because purposes can be conceived, and because what makes something sublime is precisely that it exceeds what we can conceive.) In judging something beautiful I engage in a strange form of reflective judgment. The particular is given, but instead of finding the concept for it, I practice a form of reflection in which reason engages in a free play. This act of free play – reflective judgment which does not end with the identification of concepts – is the source of pleasure which motivates my claim, “This is beautiful.” I see nature as something which has a supremely appropriate form for being judged: it presents an opportunity for the imagination and the understanding to act in harmony. Crucially, for Kant, this claim is nonetheless universal because the quality of reason – the structure of reflective judgment – is identical for all reasoning agents. Kant contrasts the beautiful with the sublime. Whereas the beautiful is tied to the pleasure of such free play, and the object is found to be suited to judgment, the sublime is tied to a significant quality of displeasure in such free play. The object not only is found ill suited to judgment but also seems actively to defy judgment. It is too vast, too awe inspiring, too overwhelming. Kant identifies such things as volcanoes or sea storms and other extreme natural phenomena. The thought of these things inspires a kind of dread which is also oddly satisfying, rather like the experience of wanting to watch horror movies and be frightened by them. Whereas beauty arises, for Kant, from the satisfying fit of the object with imagination and understanding, the sublime arises from the satisfying lack of fit of the object with reason. Again, judgments of the sublime are universal because the reason with which there is a satisfying lack of fit is invariant. The sublime seems fitted for a lack of fit, if one can express the matter in a suitable contradiction. It is the next move that is significant for theology. Both the beautiful and the sublime are somehow contained by reason. For Kant, our deepest satisfaction is not in the object but in our response to the object. Our discovery that there is a harmonious relation of imagination and understanding, in the case of beauty, or that there is something like an intention to defy our comprehension, in the case of the sublime, awakens a renewed appreciation for reason. For Kant, the sublime reveals our superiority over nature; it displays our mind’s power over sense; it enables us to appreciate our autonomy; we simultaneously see our physical selves as subject to the overwhelming power of nature, and our rational selves as independent of it. This account of the sublime is most revealing. Two contradictory tendencies are displayed. In one direction, nature’s awe overwhelms us. In the other direction, the transformation of fear into delight seems to reveal our autonomous superiority. We are both at the mercy of, and independent of, nature. This reflects a particularly intense form of the opposition of the view of human agency as subject to cause and effect (from the viewpoint of theoretical philosophy) and utterly free (from the viewpoint of practical philosophy). The sublime expresses this opposition simultaneously. What is revealing is the insistence that reason wins out. Even

KANT

27

the most violent, majestic, crushing magnitude of nature is finally contained by reason’s contemplation. It is tempting to wonder if the sublime represents Kant’s fantasy of reason’s invulnerability in the face of the incalculably great. The idea that even “that than which nothing greater can be thought” can be contained by reason is the most astonishing triumph of human subjectivity. Kant explicitly considers the claim that we should interpret natural phenomena as signs of a divine might to which we ought to submit. He rejects this with contempt. Instead, we are to be conscious of our upright, God-pleasing disposition and understand ourselves as sublimely suited to conform to God’s will. For Kant, it is not God’s greatness that should inspire or awe us; it is the harmony of rational nature and divine will. This account is also revealing in another way. It is not the particular object – the particular natural phenomenon, the particular earthquake, or the particular storm – that is marvelous in the end. It is ourselves. The storm is merely the occasion for a display to ourselves of our autonomy. It does not much matter whether it is a storm or a volcano, or whether it is this storm or that storm. Insofar as they are occasions, they are indistinguishable. We certainly transfer this self-respect to some natural object. Indeed, this transfer is what provides the occasion for the intuition that our rationality is superior to nature. But in the end what we respect, in our respect for that which overwhelms us, is ourselves. This argument has perhaps the single most important theological resonance in the whole of Kant’s philosophy. It has a similar shape to Ludwig Feuerbach’s argument in The Essence of Christianity that human speech about God is, in the end, merely a projection of human self-understanding. Kant’s claim “The feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation” is close to Feuerbach’s “In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.” Kant does not go so far, of course: his remarks in § 27 of the Critique of Judgement are solely concerned with nature, not God. Moreover we just saw that Kant refuses in § 28 to interpret natural phenomena as signs of God’s agency. Nonetheless, it is striking that Kant shows a strong tendency to see in the apparent greatness of what lies outside us an expression of authentic human superiority over it. In his aesthetics, especially his account of the sublime, Kant presents a triple challenge for orthodox theological reasoning: (a) reason subdues all that appears superior to it; (b) our respect for sublime nature is in fact more deeply a form of self-respect; and (c) particulars are, at the deepest level, of no consequence. Kant’s habits of thought present some tall hurdles to any attempt theologically to make sense of the particularity of Jesus Christ, whose sacrifice both calls for human self-dispossession and surpasses human understanding.

Conclusion It is the fate of some major philosophers for their generative yet unsystematic work to be corrected and turned into a system by a successor. Descartes’ arguments in Meditations (1641) were corrected and systematized by Spinoza in

28

NICHOLAS ADAMS

Ethics (1677). Leibniz’s arguments in a variety of papers and articles were corrected and systematized by Wolff in a series of Vernünftige Gedanken (1712– 1725). Kant’s philosophy, distributed over a wide body of texts, was corrected and systematized not once but twice, by K. L. Reinhold in Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (1786–1787) and by J. G. Fichte in Wissenschaftslehre (1794) – both during Kant’s lifetime. Part of this fate is to have one’s ideas conflated with these interpretations of one’s ideas and, worse, for one’s fame and influence to be secured not solely by one’s ideas but also in part by these corrections or systematizations of these ideas. Leibniz was overwhelmingly influential in Germany because of Wolff. Kant, likewise, became the towering figure of German philosophy partly through interpretations by Reinhold and Fichte. The consequences for appraisals of Kant have been severe. Many of the problems attributed to Kant, especially those relating to the “thing in itself ” and the apparent split between “noumena” and “phenomena,” can be traced to interpretations by F. H. Jacobi or Reinhold. Hegel’s critique of Kant often seems to be a critique of a distinctly Fichtean account of Kant. It is only with more recent scholarship in English (listed in the bibliography at the end of this chapter) that there has been a significant shift in both defenses and criticisms of Kant, which are focused less on “Kantian” arguments and more on Kant’s texts. This work is beginning to find its way into the mainstream of theological debates about the merits and demerits of “Kantian” philosophy. This chapter has attempted to identify Kant’s challenges to theology not in his epistemology or deontological ethics per se, but rather in his (perhaps unintentional) narrowing of the scope of certain key terms, especially “God,” and in his (quite intentional) emphasis on the autonomous individual at the expense of a proper account of institutional agency and authority. This narrowing and emphasis are arguably fatal to any theology, because Christian theology makes almost no sense without an account of God which pervades everything, and a model of agency in which actions divine and human, institutional and individual, are related in complex and overlapping ways. The nineteenth century inherited Kant and his interpreters’ accounts of Kant, and when key nineteenth-century figures name Kant, the arguments rehearsed are often those of Jacobi, Reinhold, or Fichte. Some care is thus required. The best way to exercise that care is to read Kant’s texts alongside the best of the more recent commentaries. Kant remains a vitally important figure for theology. His shift from intuition to judgment, his refusal of utilitarianism in favor of duty and moral consciousness, his claim that truly moral thinking requires a commitment to transcendence (which for him means affirming God’s existence), and his insistence that religious claims that appeal to reasons must be evaluated using rules of public argumentation rather than decided by the fiat of religious authorities – all these have had positive and generative effects on subsequent theology. At the same time, his split between “nature” and “freedom”; his contraction of the scope of the meaning of terms like “soul” and “God”; his emphasis on individual responsibility and agency, and corresponding neglect of institutions, history, and context; his

KANT

29

distortion of “grace”; and above all his tendency toward over-generalization displayed in his claims to have identified universal and invariant features of human action – these constitute obstacles which any theology must confront, account for, and overcome. Kant’s genius lay in his identification and clear articulation of the rules that govern human action, especially thinking, combined with his insistence that following such rules is a matter of genuine spontaneity that is not governed by rules. Theology can best benefit from this genius by combining its gift for articulating shapes and patterns with an attentiveness to particulars, to contexts, and to local variations: in short, an incarnational habit of thinking which is utterly particular and utterly historical yet endlessly committed to public argumentation and to making sense of – and healing – the relations of particulars to each other and to God.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Mike Higton, Rachel Muers, Cameron Thomson, and Susannah Ticciati for detailed comments and suggestions for improvement.

Bibliography Principal Works by Kant Gregor, Mary. Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Includes Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, and The Metaphysics of Morals.) Guyer, Paul, and Eric Matthews. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Guyer, Paul, and Allen Wood. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wood, Allen, and George di Giovanni. Religion and Rational Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Includes Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.)

Biography Kuehn, Manfred. Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Basic Introductions Bowie, Andrew. Introduction to German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas, chap 1. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.

30

NICHOLAS ADAMS

Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism, chaps. 1–3. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Walker, Ralph. Kant. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998.

More Detailed Accounts Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Ameriks, Karl. Kant and the Fate of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ameriks, Karl. Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Guyer, Paul (ed.). Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Guyer, Paul (ed.). Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Longuenesse, Beatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 2

Schleiermacher Christine Helmer

To understand the work of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), it is necessary to begin with his understanding of how humans think. One feature of modern thought is the propensity to take thinking as an object of itself, and in this context, Schleiermacher’s theology is exemplary of modern thinking. Schleiermacher’s system of theology, Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith) of 1830–1831, is considered by theologians and philosophers a paragon of modern theology, exhibiting the systematic beauty and the distinctive concerns of modern thought. It is beautiful in its architectural presentation of comprehensive historical material and concerned with strictly adhering to the bounds of critical philosophy. Its expression is compelled by the desire to know, and it is restrained by human conditions of thinking and communicating thoughts in intersubjective milieux. Yet theology for Schleiermacher is not a matter of direct revelation from God, but a historical and linguistic expression of the desire to communicate and explain theology’s truth from the perspective of a living religion. For Schleiermacher, this is Protestant Christianity as represented by both the Lutheran and Reformed traditions.1 As a theology based on fundamental convictions about thinking and experiencing within the frame of historical human conditions, Schleiermacher’s thought has presented difficulties to theologies insisting on their own exceptionalism as a form of knowledge. In this essay I explore some challenging aspects of Schleiermacher’s thought with the hope that readers might better understand how theology can still be considered a special discipline while not cutting itself off from human thinking.

Preliminary Comments The issue of theology’s relation to thinking has precipitated much confusion, primarily in theological circles. The famous Swiss theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, is known for a lifelong struggle to appreciate Schleiermacher

32

CHRISTINE HELMER

in the midst of deep misgivings concerning the integrity of Schleiermacher’s theological commitments. An afterword by Barth, published together with an anthology of Schleiermacher’s writings in 1968, summarizes a lifetime of vacillating between interpretative alternatives.2 The issue turns on the way Barth construes Schleiermacher’s appeal to philosophy in theology. Specifically, Barth believes that Schleiermacher is grounding his theology in what Schleiermacher calls “ethics,” a philosophy of history that reflects an anthropological description of human thinking, doing, and feeling as states of consciousness. Schleiermacher’s theology, Barth suspects, compromises the truth of its claims about God when it is rendered in human epistemological and psychological terms. The concrete text in question is Schleiermacher’s “Introduction” in §§ 1–31 of The Christian Faith. Is its status that of a philosophical foundation for the theology contained in parts I and II? Or is it a preliminary contextualization of theology’s task and method in the non-theological disciplines that Schleiermacher outlines in the introduction as ethics, philosophy of religion, and apologetics? The former question has obfuscated the interpretation of Schleiermacher’s work for the past century; the latter question represents the more recent attempts by scholars to establish the parameters of the discussion of Schleiermacher’s theology in terms other than theology’s captivity to philosophy’s alien categories. One of these recent interpretations has focused Schleiermacher’s thought in terms of its systematic relatedness. Schleiermacher, in addition to his professional activities as pastor and professor, also served as co-founder with Wilhelm von Humboldt of the first modern university in the West at Berlin in 1809. The key to his vision for the various departments as related to each other and to the university as a whole was a system for “sciences” (Wissenschaft, in German, refers to any academic discipline in pursuit of knowledge) that he developed to correspond to the idea of knowledge (die Idee des Wissens).3 During the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century context of German Idealism, thinkers – Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example – were excited by the possibility of understanding how the ideal, or concepts, in thought could correspond both epistemologically and metaphysically to reality. A significant preoccupation concerned these thinkers: how to distinguish the idea of knowledge into its constituent parts in such a way that they would refer to the different academic disciplines. Schleiermacher, who had embarked on translating Plato’s works from Greek into German, appropriated Plato’s division of knowledge into two areas: ethics, which Schleiermacher referred to as the reality constituted by human agency, and physics, which is the reality constituted by nature. Schleiermacher envisioned the academic faculty of arts and sciences to represent the two areas of knowledge: arts representing ethics and sciences representing physics. The entire faculty was further sub-divided into pure and applied arts and sciences, so that each art or science was made up of its pure, or theoretical, designation and its applied, or practical, designation. Pure history, to use an example from arts rather than the more obvious examples from the natural sciences, might be seen as the philosophy of history, while applied history might be

SCHLEIERMACHER

33

empirical historiography. Schleiermacher also envisioned a distinct sphere of knowledge he called the “technical and critical” disciplines that would facilitate the mediation between theory and application. Schleiermacher’s dialectic and hermeneutics were the technical and critical disciplines destined to be used in all academic areas of study in order to bring theory to bear on empirical reality and map empirical data onto a conceptual grid. Finally, the three disciplines of jurisprudence, medicine, and theology were assigned a location outside the “real sciences” of arts and sciences. These were the “positive sciences,” designated positive because their function was directed by institutions outside the university, namely, the legal court, the hospital, and the church. This brief description of Schleiermacher’s systematic vision for the modern university is complemented by a look at the systematic commitments of Schleiermacher’s academic activity. Schleiermacher was a polymath. He not only envisaged different academic disciplines but also actually researched and taught in these disciplines, and in some cases laid down their foundational parameters. Schleiermacher’s training was in theology (in the broad, German sense of Theologie), and he focused his early career on the pastoral ministry. Yet his first book-length publication was in the field of philosophical ethics, the Foundations for a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory from 1803, and the Speeches on Religion that he wrote from February to April 1799 while a chaplain at the Charité Hospital in Berlin articulated one of the most compelling cases of all time for religion as constitutive of human nature. His reputation as an academic theologian came later. He was appointed to the theology faculty at the incipient University of Berlin in 1808, an appointment that included the responsibility to lecture in the different fields that Schleiermacher conceptualized for the modern study of theology: philosophical theology, historical theology (which included New Testament studies, the history of Christianity, and dogmatic theology), and practical theology. He established the parameters of deuterocanonical literature with a commentary on 1 Timothy (1807), and contributed to the early nineteenth-century discussions of the interdependence and development of the Synoptic Gospels with a commentary on Luke in 1817. Unfortunately, his erroneous commitment to John as the original Gospel writer prevented him from having a lasting impact on New Testament studies. Although his professorial appointment was in theology, rather than in philosophy, Schleiermacher was invited to be a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, founded by the eighteenth-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. As a member, Schleiermacher was permitted to lecture on philosophy. The Lectures on Dialectic delivered six times between 1811 and 1833, when he wrote the introduction for publication, establish dialectic as the procedure for the production of knowledge of reality on the grounds of critical philosophy. Schleiermacher also conceived dialectic as a dialogical process entailing interpersonal communication and understanding. The lectures on Hermeneutics and Criticism stand as the undisputed origins of the modern study of interpretation as well as serve as a significant impetus to higher biblical criticism. In addition

34

CHRISTINE HELMER

to these lectures in the technical-critical disciplines, Schleiermacher was also preoccupied with pedagogy, political science, and psychology. His uncanny foresight in the early part of the nineteenth century concerning the major intellectual challenges to the study of theology were met with a systematic commitment to relating theology to other academic disciplines, such as history and philosophy, politics and hermeneutics, and culture and religion. He is known as not only the “father of modern theology,” but also a theorist of culture, a sociologist and psychologist of religion, and a philosopher of self-consciousness reaching deep into the philosophy of language. The emerging consensus in Schleiermacher scholarship consists of contextualizing Schleiermacher’s thought by its systematic parameters. A particular topic in Schleiermacher’s work can only be adequately addressed by viewing its content and treatment as related to and distinguished in systematic context. This interpretative method has significant implications for understanding Schleiermacher’s theology. Theology’s method is constituted by the same epistemological processes and the same intersubjective conditions relevant to all intellectual inquiry. Theology’s content is unique as its particular area of study is the systematic mapping of normative ideas that are produced by specific religious communities. Yet the ways in which ideas are gathered in the first place from living communities, and subsequently defined and organized, are no other than by the epistemological and intersubjective mechanisms characterizing any pursuit of knowledge. A discussion of Schleiermacher on theology requires contextualizing his understanding of theology and its distinct subject matter – historical religion as lived in communities of faith – in relation to the anthropological constituents of thinking and doing, as well as language’s capacity to articulate thought. Human thought and linguistic expression are further shaped by epistemological conditions governing the production of knowledge and by the intersubjective conditions of interpersonal understanding and misunderstanding. A revision of Barth’s misunderstanding of Schleiermacher must begin with a correct interpretation of how philosophy in Schleiermacher’s sense of dialectic and hermeneutics informs the production of knowledge in Protestant theology in the way that Schleiermacher intended to highlight the uniqueness of the Christian religion. I now turn to a more precise treatment of Schleiermacher’s philosophy, beginning with the Dialektik in order to show what the academic desire for knowledge entails. Dialectic, for Schleiermacher, addresses the human desire to convert thinking into knowledge that is both discursive and systematic. But this definition requires elucidation as to both the way that thinking arises in human persons – this means thinking in relation to other areas of human existence, how thinking is related to both the kind of consciousness producing thinking and the discursive shaping of thinking in its articulation in language – and how thinking is oriented to knowledge. The desire to know (das Wissenwollen) is interpersonally embodied in the “art of conducting conversation,” as Schleiermacher defines dialectic by translating literally the Greek dialegesthein. Dialectic entails hermeneutics, which I treat in the subsequent section on the hermeneutical aspects of the production

SCHLEIERMACHER

35

of knowledge. Once Schleiermacher’s dialogical-dialectic is established as the parameter for any intersubjective production of knowledge, his specific understanding of Christian theology can be appreciated as an application of his method to an area of particular human experience and language not accounted for by any other area of academic inquiry, yet in terms that can be understood.

Dialectic: Epistemological Considerations in the Production of Knowledge Schleiermacher reported in a letter to his older sister Charlotte in 1802 that the Schleiermacher family’s short stay in 1783 at Gnadenfrei, the community of the Herrnhuter Brethren (Moravian Brothers), had precipitated a life-changing moment: “here my consciousness of the relation of human beings to a higher world first arose…. Here there first developed that mystical disposition which is so essential to me and has saved and preserved me under all the assaults of skepticism. Here I became a Herrnhuter of a ‘higher order.’ ”4 It took Schleiermacher eighteen more years after composing his letter to work out its implications in theology and philosophy. In 1821–1822, Schleiermacher establishes the feeling of utter dependence at the center of his introduction to the first edition of The Christian Faith. In 1822, Schleiermacher’s philosophical lectures on Dialektik reveal an intellectual breakthrough in relating the striving toward knowledge to its transcendental condition as the “transcendent ground.” The theologian educated in Pietist boarding schools during his youth and later in Enlightenment thought at the University of Halle would find the key to both Dialektik and theological system in the experience of an anthropological index to a ground hidden from human scrutiny, yet establishing the very parameters of that scrutiny. Schleiermacher situates the transcendent ground from the Dialektik’s perspective in relation to the human desire for knowledge, while he determines the feeling of utter dependence from the theological perspective of The Christian Faith in relation to the historical religion of Christianity. The key text for studying how Schleiermacher conceives of thinking in relation to its conditions is the Dialektik.5 The text’s difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that it exists as lecture notes from 1811 to 1831 in a number of different versions. Schleiermacher had very much wanted to see the Dialektik completed in the same book form as his Christian Faith, as he told his student, Ludwig Jonas, but died before he could realize the project. Jonas was bequeathed the notes, which he edited, also providing an excellent and extended commentary for the 1839 publication of the Sämmtliche Werke of Schleiermacher’s works by Georg Reimer.6 The question of dialectic was of central philosophical interest in the early nineteenth-century discussion concerning knowledge. Both Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who lectured on dialectic in Berlin at about the time that Schleiermacher was developing his ideas on the matter, had been working on the problem since Immanuel Kant had deemed dialectic a cognitive quandary

36

CHRISTINE HELMER

in his Critique of Pure Reason. The question concerning how reality could correspond to the ideas (or concepts) of reality became the question of knowledge as system in the post-Kantian period. If knowledge was to be the system of how the real agreed with the ideal (or being with thought), then dialectic became the question of how this knowledge was produced. Schleiermacher’s answer, in contrast to Fichte’s and Hegel’s idealism, was oriented to a realism that yielded no more knowledge than could be sustained within the limits of Kant’s critical philosophy. Schleiermacher’s Dialektik is a modest epistemological proposal. The Dialektik prescribes two requirements for knowledge: (a) the agreement between thought and reality; and (b) the identity in all of the pathways in coming to knowledge claims. On the surface, these requirements seem simply to state a philosophical consensus. Knowledge is generally defined as the correspondence between thought and being: a claim to knowledge must articulate a judgment that agrees with the way in which subject and predicate are related in reality. Furthermore, any claim to knowledge presupposes an identical process by which that knowledge is reached. This process must be uniform, so that the possibility of fluke or fantasy is excluded. Identity as sameness – not diversity of opinion – characterizes knowledge. Schleiermacher concurs with this consensus. He defines knowledge in his philosophical ethics7 as “identical symbolization,” which means that the experimental or thought process that produces knowledge must be reproducible in the same way by all. By “symbolization” in his sense of “ethics,” Schleiermacher means the particular ways in which reason (or thought) is related to nature (or reality). Reason, in the case of symbolization, penetrates nature in such a way as to make nature its “symbol.” Reason is the tool by which nature is made intelligible: for example, the laws of physics reveal the rational structure of natural processes. Yet the two requirements are not as easily fulfilled as they first appear. For Schleiermacher, there is no knowledge without system. System as the main characteristic of knowledge was a consensus in the Enlightenment ever since Leibniz claimed his Monadologie to be his system. Schleiermacher, like his postKantian colleagues, insisted on the systematic requirement for agreement between thought and being. Knowledge is achieved when the system of ideas corresponds to the totality of reality. The institutionalization of this view of knowledge is the modern university – in Schleiermacher’s case, the University of Berlin – that is structured by different departments as they constitute an interlocking system of ideas that correspond to the distinct spheres of reality as subjects of study making up the system of reality. The university as a whole is oriented to reality as a whole. Agreement is not between individual propositions and corresponding states of affairs, as a modern theory of truth as correspondence might hold, but between system and reality. On the surface, correspondence as the first requirement for knowledge appears to privilege a metaphysical orientation for knowledge. Yet when considered together with the second requirement, that of identical process, the metaphysical focus recedes and an epistemological lens takes its place. Epistemology, not

SCHLEIERMACHER

37

metaphysics, becomes for Schleiermacher the primary question of knowledge. The question concerning the content of knowledge claims is inextricably tied to the question concerning how the human being can know. Schleiermacher builds on Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” by looking at knowledge through the lens of the human capacity for and limits to knowing. While thinking is the human process involving the human (and hence limited) capacities of intellectual and organic functions – reason and sense perception – knowledge is the ideal that cannot be attained. Whereas bits of reality can be at least partially understood, the connections of bits to each other in the totality of reality remain elusive. Schleiermacher’s Dialektik is not a metaphysic that grounds claims of correspondence, but is a progressive teasing out of the processes by which thinking – oriented to knowing – occurs. Dialectic is a process of carefully extracting procedures regulating thinking from what little we know about thinking on the basis of the two criteria for knowledge. It is about rules, rather than results. Yet Schleiermacher’s epistemology is related to a metaphysic that grounds the process of thinking’s desire to know in the first place. The way Schleiermacher gains access to the metaphysical ground of thinking is his unique contribution to a discussion that can be said to capture a major philosophical preoccupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The question concerns the constitution of human subjectivity. The post-Kantian search for “system” was twinned with the search for the ground of subjectivity because this ground would explain how the ideal and the real were metaphysically united. If the question is answered in terms of the ultimate transparency of the soul to its constituent ground – as Hegel does – then the self and world are ultimately knowable. Human reason can and does know reality because human subjectivity is metaphysically constituted by the “Absolute” grounding the unity between ideas and reality. If the question is answered in terms of the fundamental opacity of the soul to its constituent ground – as Schleiermacher does – then subjectivity is characterized by an elusive self-consciousness that yields an even more elusive sign to its metaphysical ground. Like Hegel, Schleiermacher aims to have a theory of self-consciousness that clues into its metaphysical ground, yet unlike Hegel, Schleiermacher frames the process of isolating the metaphysical ground in the sole terms of human feeling. The result is, at best, opaque. The Dialektik of 1822 is so significant in Schleiermacher’s corpus because its key insight dovetails with the principle structuring his theological system, The Christian Faith. Both works turn to the same two human capacities of thinking and willing in order to discern their unity in feeling, yet the Dialektik differs significantly from The Christian Faith because its discovery of the “transcendent ground” is cast exclusively in metaphysical, not religious, terms. The question of subjectivity is raised at the very end of the Dialektik’s first part, the “transcendental” part. Schleiermacher takes the oscillation between human thinking and willing as the defining question and explores how the unity of both activities can be attained. The mediating point of the transitions between thinking and willing is the self, where thinking is merged with being. Schleiermacher

38

CHRISTINE HELMER

locates the ground of identity between thought and reality in “us”; “we” are being and thinking, the thinking being (das denkende Sein) and the thinking that is (das seiende Denken).8 Yet this mediation is not perpetuated by the self. The transition Schleiermacher argues is located externally to the self as its transcendent source. As a transcendent source, it cannot be experienced; as a transcendental source, it cannot be cognized. Rather it is “felt” by the self as the incapacity of the self to ground its own subjectivity. It is a feeling of a lack. In the terms of the Dialektik, this lack is felt in immediate self-consciousness; in The Christian Faith, this lack is described as the self-consciousness that “negatives absolute freedom” and “is itself precisely a consciousness of absolute dependence” (CF § 4.3). In epistemological and in theological terms – and for Schleiermacher the two are to be strictly distinguished from each other – the realism of a higher order is achieved by the feeling of a lack. The Dialektik thematizes lack in the metaphysical terms of the opacity of the self to the transcendent ground, while productively orienting the feeling of lack to a discussion of epistemology. The Christian Faith initially thematizes the lack in the bare terms of the unity between self and world as that unity is dependent on an external cause, and subsequently fleshes out this lack in Christian theological terms of Jesus’ accomplishment of universal redemption. The Dialektik can be said to elucidate Schleiermacher’s self-designation as a “Herrnhuter of a higher order” by tying the question of subjectivity to the question of knowledge. The psychological aspect of the self that discloses a relation to its transcendent ground is feeling, while the philosophical question of knowledge is worked out epistemologically. Without metaphysical certainty, the epistemological working-out of procedures for the production of knowledge and the testing of claims to knowledge relies on intersubjectivity as its inevitable contextualization. People make claims to knowledge, and they make them in such a way that they want to communicate them to others and so be understood by others. Hermeneutics is the intersubjective side of dialectic to which I now turn.

Dialogue: Hermeneutical Considerations in the Production of Knowledge The question of intersubjectivity is constitutive of Schleiermacher’s preoccupation with the production of knowledge. Although the Dialektik is mainly concerned with epistemological and transcendental issues, it hints at its hermeneutical presuppositions in the two criteria that Schleiermacher establishes for knowledge, namely, correspondence and identity of process. An important question concerns how testing of these criteria can take place in order to gain certainty that thinking is indeed striving for knowledge. For Schleiermacher, the only viable candidate for testing is intersubjective communication. Only when claims of correspondence and accounts of how these claims have come to be made are checked against others can one ascertain if the two criteria for knowledge have been fulfilled (or not).

SCHLEIERMACHER

39

Schleiermacher’s definition of dialectic in intersubjective terms distinguishes him from his German Idealist contemporaries, Fichte and then Hegel. One of the key texts in which Schleiermacher explains the hermeneutical partnership to dialectic is the 1833 “Introduction” to the Dialektik, the only section of the Dialektik that Schleiermacher ever published during his lifetime. Paragraph 4 sets his position in sharp contrast to that of others who, as Schleiermacher criticizes, define dialectic by inventing a language that conveys no intersubjective meaning. Thinking is only relevant in relation to knowledge when it is articulated in language in an interpersonal context. Hermeneutics works with dialectic in order to facilitate the intersubjective processes of communication and understanding in the endeavors of producing discursive knowledge. The hermeneutical “art of understanding another person’s utterance correctly”9 is an interpersonal duty that makes dialectic possible. The key presupposition that not only characterizes Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics but also captures a fundamental approach of his thought is a mechanism of “externalization” explaining why thinking requires language. “Discourse,” Schleiermacher writes in the Hermeneutics and Criticism, his lectures on hermeneutics, “is only the thought itself which has come into existence.”10 By “coming into existence,” Schleiermacher means that thinking taking place as a process in consciousness is manifest externally to others when thought’s content, structured by the forms of thinking, is externalized in language. Thought’s forms are externalized by the proposition that “s is p” (for example, “The emerald is green”). On the basis of language’s subject–predicate form, Schleiermacher can argue that language represents the way that thinking links predicates to a subject, thereby forming concepts. There is a continuum between thought and language that both necessarily relates thinking to an intention outside of consciousness – thinking is about something – and communicates that intention to others. Schleiermacher has often been misunderstood on this point concerning the relation of thought to language. A common misunderstanding attributes to Schleiermacher a separation between thought and language. Language “expresses” an experience that is considered to be pre-conceptual and pre-discursive; language is an accidental discursive representation of a content interior to consciousness.11 Yet this misunderstanding is easily cleared up when two fundamental elements of Schleiermacher’s thought are considered. Schleiermacher stresses that thought and language are related on a continuum. First, the continuum is an ontological structure that early nineteenth-century thinkers appropriated from Leibniz in order to explain how a unified system can arise from two entities. At any point on the continuum, an intimate and necessary relation between the two poles is ontologically established. Second, the continuum secures the bidirectionality between thought and language. If communication is oriented to the goal of successful interpersonal interaction, then communication must take place under the condition of linguistic commonality. Language must be presupposed to have common aspects in order for communication to occur in such a way that it is understood by someone other than the communicator.

40

CHRISTINE HELMER

An interpretation that attributes to Schleiermacher a private interior fact of consciousness subsequently groping for language hoping to express it does not appreciate Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical insight that interpretation must necessarily presuppose the relation of language to intentional thinking (thinking that is about something). As we will see in the next section on theology, the thought–language continuum has important consequences for understanding the linguistic features of a historical religion. The continuum connecting thought to language is based on a philosophicalanthropological mechanism that explains why externalization is an inevitable and necessary aspect of consciousness. A text that describes this mechanism is the “Ethics” section, §§ 3–6, of the “Introduction” (§§ 1–31) to The Christian Faith. By “ethics,” Schleiermacher means a study of the principles of history as psychological explanations for human agency. The ethics section in §§ 3–6 describes the structure of consciousness in order to show the psychological reason for the various social institutions by which human agents act in history. If thinking is related to the academy and doing to politics, then feeling is the psychological explanation for religion as necessarily lived out in historical communities. Schleiermacher’s mechanism of externalization presupposes both a realism in regard to the content that is “revealed” and a necessary intersubjective motivation for externalization. A human person wants to disclose or describe the contents of her consciousness to others so that they too might be able to compare experiences with her. The “consciousness of kind” that anthropologically constitutes every human person grounds a fundamental human openness to others. Subjectivity is disclosed to be co-constituted with intersubjectivity by the sheer fact of interpersonal communication.12 Once the mechanism of externalization is found to be anthropologically basic, its underlying psychological structure can be described in such a way as to explain how a pole of interiority that maintains individuality of thoughts and feeling is necessarily related on a continuum to its communication through gestures and words already having a common determination. The German philosopher Manfred Frank has now reconstructed and then redated Schleiermacher’s lecture notes on hermeneutics together with additional material in order to yield the current two-part sequence as grammatical and psychological explications. Frank’s edition has been translated into English by Andrew Bowie.13 The solid footing that Frank has given to the study of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics dovetails with the continuum that we have seen to characterize Schleiermacher’s metaphysic of intimate relation between an inner core of identity and its external expressions in temporal development. The two-part division to the Hermeneutics exhibits the tight connection that Schleiermacher envisions between the grammatical and psychological aspects of interpretation, and, as Frank insists, highlights the significance of the grammatical as sole access to the psychological intention of the author. Just as there is no approach to an essential and unchanging core of a historical entity that is metaphysically distinct from its temporal and changing manifestations, so there is no way to grasp the psychological intention motivating an author to write her text other than through an

SCHLEIERMACHER

41

interpretation of her literary composition. (We will revisit this same point in the next section on the “essence” of religion and of Christianity.) By “grammatical” interpretation, Schleiermacher means all the literary features that can yield an interpretation of the text as produced by an author. These features include the entire grammatical, syntactical, logical, rhetorical, and tonal features of a language as used by the individual author and as compared to the grammatical-linguistic conventions used in the author’s context. A text’s meaning can be gleaned by comparing the author’s “subjective” use of a language with the way in which that language is used “objectively” by others. Schleiermacher also pays attention to details such as the ways in which relative clauses are related to the main part of the sentence in order to yield authorial emphasis, the genre in which the language occurs that shapes the subject matter in a distinctive way, the way parts of a sentence are logically related to each other to indicate psychological connections between ideas about reality, and the rhetorical function of a particular choice of words that gives literary clues as to the value and meaning an author assigns to a term. The language pole of the thought–language continuum is connected to the author’s psychological motivation. By following a text’s grammar to its psychological pole, Schleiermacher intends to reconstruct the author’s intention in communicating a linguistic-literary articulation of an experience. For Schleiermacher, the “psychological” pole means both the reference to reality that the author intends by the text and the point in the author’s biography at which the particular text is externalized. The grammatical and psychological aspects of the text yield authorial intention in terms of both a reference to an experience and its moment of expression in the author’s biography. A text’s meaning is intimately related to its production. The hermeneutical theories that Schleiermacher established for modern knowledge are evident in his hermeneutical praxis. In fact, the practice of his theory set the parameters for modern interpretative traditions in Plato studies and in New Testament studies. Schleiermacher translated Plato’s entire corpus into German14 and interpreted Plato’s work as the externalization of a motivating intention (Tendenz), unfolded and developed in the distinct dialogues. Schleiermacher used his interpretative method to date the works as Early, Middle, and Late Dialogues, thereby establishing the consensus (with slight modification) for today. Similarly setting the stage for modern deuteropauline studies, Schleiermacher interpreted the New Testament epistle, 1 Timothy, by comparing its literary expressions to the Pauline corpus, and concluded that the author of 1 Timothy could not have been Paul. He also identified the basic parallel literary structure of Colossians 1:15–20 – the relation between Christ in creation (verses 15–16b) and Christ in redemption (verses 18b–20b) – that still is the exegetical consensus.15 Another debate in New Testament studies with which Schleiermacher was preoccupied concerned the question of Synoptic dependence. Schleiermacher offered an interpretation of John’s Gospel that differed substantially from increasing scholarly consensus regarding Mark’s

42

CHRISTINE HELMER

originality. Although proved wrong, Schleiermacher’s interpretation is compelling from the perspective that it takes seriously the literary criterion of coherence in order to make the case that John experienced Jesus close up, and wrote the first Gospel out of the psychological immediacy of this experience. Schleiermacher’s own hermeneutical praxis shows how he regarded texts as productions of authors. The text is not an inert letter, unrelated to reality, but a transcript of a living, experiencing human being. The dialectic and the hermeneutics are two academic disciplines displaying structural similarity. Both dialectic and hermeneutics are oriented to an elusive ground of unity while establishing access to the ground through the reality of intersubjective interactions with one’s environment constituting individual development. Yet they are also mirrors of each other. The dialectic aims to get at correspondence and the identity of knowledge production through the diversity of sense perceptions and experiences in a linguistic milieu, while the hermeneutics looks at the diversities of literary-linguistic expressions in order to grasp an author’s motivation to externalize an experience for others that in turn provides glimpses into the author’s core identity. Both the desire to know and intersubjectivity are contextualized, not relativized, under conditions of human existence. Schleiermacher’s self-designation as a “Herrnhuter of a higher order” preserves the central Pietist insight into the personal experience of the unifying ground of existence, while addressing the complex epistemological and hermeneutical issues of subjectivity under human conditions. Schleiermacher’s theology, as I will show in the next section, takes his Pietist leanings into a “higher order” of taking seriously the conditions, motivations, and experiences available to humans as they articulate the truth about self redeemed by Jesus in relation to both world and God.

Christian Theology: The Production of Knowledge about Historical Christianity We now turn to Schleiermacher’s thought in theology that appropriates dialectic and hermeneutics as its method in studying the distinct phenomenon of Protestant Christianity. Schleiermacher was ordained a Reformed pastor, and served as pastor from 1809 to1834 to the large Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Church of the Triune God) in Berlin, a mixed Lutheran and Reformed congregation. Yet Schleiermacher began to articulate his thoughts on religion in 1799 with the Speeches (its lengthier title is, in English, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers), one of the most inspired texts of Christian apologetics since the origins of Christianity and a major proposal for the modern concept of religion. Religion, Schleiermacher argues against the intellectual elite of his day who thought they had freed metaphysical and moral truths from religious deviations, is a necessary element of human existence. “Praxis is an art, speculation is a science, religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite,” Schleiermacher

SCHLEIERMACHER

43

famously defines religion in speech 2.16 Religion is a necessary part of human existence, assigned to an integral yet distinct part of the soul that requires culture, education, experience, and language for its cultivation. Schleiermacher insisted on religion as “positive,” localized in concrete communities, each shaped by distinctive historical and cultural traditions, and identified by specific rituals and texts preserved and developed from the respective religion’s origins. Religion as a human capacity does not exist in abstraction from religious communities. This section on Schleiermacher’s theology is divided into two parts. The first part shows how Schleiermacher situates Jesus of Nazareth in his understanding of Christianity and of Christian theology. For Schleiermacher, Jesus as really present to his disciples before his resurrection and to generations of Christians throughout the history of the Christian Church is the source and sustenance of the Christian religion. One theological task is to recover an understanding of who Jesus is from the origins of Christianity, specifically from the New Testament. We will see how Schleiermacher’s exegetical recovery of Jesus’ person and work uses tools and methods from the dialectic and hermeneutics. The second part of this section looks at how Schleiermacher builds his system of Christian theology on the basis of claims regarding Jesus as cause of personal transformation. Two theological texts will be cited: the system of The Christian Faith, and its complement, Brief Outline for the Study of Theology,17 that Schleiermacher used as introductory lectures to the study of theology as he envisioned it for the University of Berlin and that still form the basis (with slight modification) of theological education today.

Reconstruction of the Christian experience of Jesus As a Herrnhuter, Schleiermacher’s piety was inevitably shaped by an intense and experientially significant focus on Jesus Christ. His father, Gottlieb Schleiermacher, was a chaplain in the Prussian army who reformed to Pietism after a conversion experience, and together with his wife, Katharina-Maria Stubenrauch, herself in a line of three generations of Reformed pastors, saw fit to have their three children, Charlotte, Friedrich, and Carl, educated in Pietist boarding schools, first at Niesky and then at Barby. Although Friedrich at the age of nineteen conveyed to his father a criticism of the Pietist emphasis on Christ’s atoning blood sacrifice, he never abandoned its focus on experiencing the redemptive presence of Jesus. Schleiermacher’s theological work, his reconstruction of the Life of Jesus,18 and his dogmatic theological decision “to construct the work so that at every point the reader would be made aware that the verse John 1:14 is the basic text for all dogmatics, just as it should be for the conduct of the ministry as a whole,”19 display his Pietist focal point on the experience of Jesus in the community. The key to Schleiermacher’s understanding of the Christian religion and its theology is the continuity of experiences of Jesus the Redeemer throughout Christianity. In order to secure this continuity, Schleiermacher underlines the

44

CHRISTINE HELMER

two states of Jesus’ appearances in the New Testament texts: his “bodily” presence in his antemortem state and a “spiritual” presence in his postmortem state. Both states for Schleiermacher admit a decisive commonality. Every experience with Jesus is personal, and each results in a decisive enhancement of life that evokes a predication. The New Testament abounds with titles for Jesus that are evocations of the transformation he has effected. He is the good shepherd, the perfect sacrifice, the healer, the crucified one, “the Messiah, the Son of the living God!” as Peter exclaims in Matthew 16:16. The experience of particular transformation becomes the predicate that is then attributed to Jesus. To the person is attributed his effect. The New Testament evocations stand at the origin of a long history of Christological predication that Schleiermacher famously sums up in § 11 of the CF: everything in “Christianity is … related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.” The ante- and postmortem continuity of Jesus’ person secures a significant association that Schleiermacher makes between work and personal presence. When Jesus is experienced as a personal presence, then he is experienced as the cause of a redemptive transformation. This association becomes the hermeneutical key to Schleiermacher’s work on the New Testament Gospels, particularly his efforts to reconstruct the “life of Jesus.” Schleiermacher oriented his study of the New Testament Gospels, particularly the Gospel of John, to find the inner motivating core to Jesus’ person that grounds Jesus’ work. The core of Jesus’ identity, Schleiermacher deems, is the point at which Jesus’ person is completely informed and saturated by God’s “indwelling” (Schleiermacher explicitly uses the Johannine term in this context). An exploration of Jesus’ consciousness would explain why Jesus speaks and works as he does, and would provide the key to plotting the development in Jesus’ life as privileged in the chronology of John’s Gospel. As we have seen with his Plato studies, Schleiermacher strives for an explanation for human individuality (he calls this a “calculus”) that would, in the case of Jesus, explain why Jesus is the perpetual cause of redemption in Christian history. Thus Schleiermacher is confident that his account of Jesus’ consciousness can link the Jesus appearing in the New Testament Gospels to subsequent theological accounts of person and work. The results of exegesis, Schleiermacher predicts, will dovetail comfortably with theological construction. Little could Schleiermacher know that his efforts to secure the historical Jesus as a reconstruction using John’s Gospel would be swiftly discredited by David Friedrich Strauss, who published his scathing critique of Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Jesus in 1865, the year after Schleiermacher’s lectures, The Life of Jesus, were published, exactly thirty years after Schleiermacher’s death in 1834.20 Schleiermacher’s understanding of Jesus is underscored by the identity between Jesus’ person and work. In this way, Schleiermacher adheres to the dominant consensus in Christianity about the decisive and definitive nature of Christ’s redeeming work. Jesus as personal presence at work is both origin of the Christian Church and enduring focal point of the Christian religion and its

SCHLEIERMACHER

45

theology. Yet in providing arguments to work out his high Christological goals, Schleiermacher ran into some academic difficulties. Karl Bretschneider had contested the historical originality of John in 1820, thereby discrediting Schleiermacher’s privileging of John on historical grounds.21 Furthermore, Schleiermacher’s emphasis on Jesus’ personal presence is construed in exclusively historical terms, thereby limiting references to Jesus in the Christian Bible to his appearances as reported in the New Testament texts. This limitation renders the Old Testament texts moot for Christian piety – although some historical continuity of concepts from Judaism, such as holiness, is reluctantly admitted – and prohibits any speculation concerning a pre-existent Christ or an immanent second person of the Trinity. Finally, Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Jesus’ passion and resurrection is so closely tied to the principle of the continuity of Jesus’ person that he ends up deeming Jesus’ death to serve no exclusive redemptive function and framing the resurrection in terms of continuity between ante- and postmortem states. Although these rather heterodox exegetical points have often been used to deny Schleiermacher admission to orthodox Christian consensus, they can also be read, and charitably so, as the exegetical, historical, and theological implications of a fundamental commitment to the decisive and definitive redemption that the Redeemer effects by his personal presence in history. In this sense, Schleiermacher’s Christology can be read to agree with a privileging of experience in some types of Protestant Christianity. How does an experience of Jesus come about? Schleiermacher responds by describing how preaching in the church can communicate Christ in such a way as to identify Jesus as the referent of preaching but to distinguish Jesus’ redemptive causality from the action of the church. What Schleiermacher aims to explain is how Jesus can be experienced under the historical conditions of the church’s preaching without identifying the experience of the church’s preaching with the experience of Jesus’ redemptive person. Schleiermacher claims, echoing Paul in Romans 10:17,22 that Jesus is the church’s “communal property” and as such is circulated by ritual gestures and verbal communication. Preaching renders Jesus present to those who hear, so that a transformative encounter can take place. Schleiermacher is able to identify preaching as the intersubjective occasion for evoking Jesus’ presence while maintaining that it is the experience of Jesus that is circulated by preaching, rather than the experience of intersubjectivity, by invoking the term “mystical.” He writes in CF § 100.3, “Now such a presentation of the redeeming activity of Christ as has been given here, which exhibits it as the establishment of a new life common to Him and us (original in Him, in us new and derived), is usually called by those who have not had the experience, ‘mystical.’ ” Schleiermacher appropriates the term “mystical” as a Christologically determined term designating how Jesus becomes available as a person “to you” in the community of faith. The final important issue in Schleiermacher’s reconstruction of Christian experience is to complement the question concerning “who” is experienced with the question of “what” is experienced. When addressing this question, it is important to situate what Schleiermacher means by religious experience.

46

CHRISTINE HELMER

Although Schleiermacher’s concept of religious experience has often been misinterpreted as a generic type of experience that is only subsequently given a Christian (and accidental) determination, it can only be adequately interpreted when Schleiermacher’s understanding of experience under the conditions of history, language, and culture is coupled with his Christological determination of “mystical.” The result is that the subject and content of Christian religious experience can only be articulated in terms of Christian concepts. Yet, as we have seen, concepts presuppose communicability by an element of commonality. Without an assumption of translatability, terms would be equivocated between semantic fields; even the likelihood of recognizing equivocations would be impossible in such a case! If a concept is determined in Christian terms, then it is possible to communicate the term to others by virtue of a common element in the concept. To use Schleiermacher’s famous examples, the terms “feeling” (Gefühl) in the Speeches and “the feeling of absolute (or utter) dependence” (das Gefühl schlechthinniger Abhängigkeit) in The Christian Faith function as the common element in the concept of religion for the purpose of translating particular determinations of historical religions from one religion to another. Furthermore, for Schleiermacher in his sense of the term, feeling has an intentional referent, so that the common element among the different religions consists of a specific feeling of the self ’s inability to ground the self in unity with world. It is the feeling “of being in relation with God,” as the second edition proposes, not a feeling of God (CF § 4.4). Schleiermacher arrives at this common element from the particular description of the Christian experience of redemption accomplished by Jesus under historical, cultural, and linguistic conditions. The specific Christian feeling is the mystical experience of what Schleiermacher calls a “total impression” of Jesus. The term “impression” connotes a Pietist distancing from discursive and linear predication along the lines of dialectical knowledge, and situates the experience in the interpersonal realm. Furthermore, the immediacy of experiencing an “image” is underscored by the term “total.” Christ’s presence in interpersonal relationship is experienced in an immediate way, rather than as a distinct “other” that can be objectified and rationalized. Finally the total impression, although circulated intersubjectively, is extracted from intersubjectivity by the experience of redemption caused by someone external to the self. Christianity’s distinctiveness is attributed to the action of Jesus in the most profound depths of the soul. Jesus is the Redeemer in the fullest sense of the word; his presence creates a new person (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17). The feeling of redemption is the feeling of absolute dependence in Christianity. As a “Herrnhuter of a higher order,” Schleiermacher’s account of Christian religious experience retains the Pietist emphasis on personal experience while giving psychological and theological explanations for its possibility. A mystical impression of Christ has its source entirely external to the soul, yet is experienced as most intimately person-forming. It now remains to be shown how this specific experience, which is framed by particular historical, cultural, and linguistic conditions, gives rise to the system of Christian theology.

SCHLEIERMACHER

47

Organization and system of Christian theology Theology is the production of knowledge concerning the historical development of the ways in which particular religious experiences are fixed in language for others. The evocations concerning Jesus’ transformative impact function are not only linguistically basic to Christianity but also soteriologically primary. Christian theology is part and parcel of a living religious tradition of Christianity because the basic linguistic articulations that are preserved even as they are selected and organized coherently are evocations of the Redeemer. Schleiermacher appeals to the basic linguistic articulations as the building blocks of his theology both in order to make sense of them when they are placed in relation to each other and also to preserve their connection to Jesus. The language of theology is not generic, but specifically determined by expressions of redemption circulating in living religious communities. If the term “science” is invoked in its German sense of Wissenschaft (arts and sciences), then what kind of science is theology? This fundamental question concerning theology’s task and method has been posed by theologians, especially since Thomas Aquinas was confronted with the challenge of conceptualizing theology as a science in relation to the newly adopted Aristotelian demonstrative science in the thirteenth century. Schleiermacher also addresses this question that was particularly compelling in his departmental blueprint for the University of Berlin, first published in 1811 as The Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study. Schleiermacher considered theology, like medicine, and jurisprudence to be “positive sciences.” The adjective “positive” is contrasted both with the “real” sciences that study areas of reality from either empirical or speculative perspective “for knowledge’s sake” and with the procedural disciplines of dialectic and hermeneutics. By “positive,” Schleiermacher simply means that the unity of the discipline as well as the division of the respective discipline’s tasks are derived from a historical-cultural institution that serves one of the three basic aspects of human flourishing. Medicine serves human health, jurisprudence serves interpersonal health, and religious communities promote spiritual health. The task of theology is to support the thriving of the human person in religious community with others. Once the task is established, the first area of theological knowledge that can be determined from the task is the production of the specific knowledge required to promote health and to eradicate disease. The church is the institution outside the university designed to apply the knowledge in the particular situation, and is therefore responsible for the individual and organizational promotion of health in the present tense in order to secure its future flourishing. Yet the knowledge accumulated for application by the church to the concrete situation is produced within the bounds of the university. Already the discipline of practical theology as the “theory of the praxis” of “the care of souls” becomes one subdivision of theology in the German sense of Theologie. Schleiermacher specified that practical theology was the production of theoretical knowledge concerning pastoral ministry. His view sets him apart from a

48

CHRISTINE HELMER

prevailing contemporary idea, at least in North America, concerning practical theology as the practical learning of ministerial activities, such as pastoral care and preaching. Practical theology for Schleiermacher is part of the positive science of theology, while “art” is reserved for the actual pastoral application of knowledge to concrete situations in the church. As a discipline most directly focused on theories relating to concrete praxis, practical theology is theology’s “crown,” as Schleiermacher writes in the first edition of the Brief Outline. Once the crown of the theological tree is designated, the tree’s trunk can be determined. The trunk, to continue Schleiermacher’s analogy, is responsible for accumulating and organizing the theological knowledge concerning the church’s constitution – its health or diseases – in the present tense. If practical theology is to fulfill its task of providing knowledge to improve the church’s condition, then it must be responsibly informed by knowledge of the present state of the church’s affairs. The task of theological diagnosis secures the connection to the church’s reality; Schleiermacher is concerned with preserving theology’s intimate connection to the reality of living religious communities. As living organic institutions, communities have histories. The acquiring of knowledge concerning the present state of the church requires the comprehensive task of knowing the origins of the respective community, how it developed through history, and how that past informs its present. Historical theology, for Schleiermacher, is divided into the three subdivisions of “exegetical theology,” the study of the church’s origins; “church history,” the study of the church’s growth and development; and “dogmatic theology,” the study of the church in its present state that includes relating its normative ideas to the ways in which the churches exist in society. Although the terms Schleiermacher uses can be replaced by the more contemporary designations of “biblical studies,” “history of Christianity,” and “systematic theology,” the historical point is the same. Theology’s classical disciplines are historical representations of the key divisions in Christianity’s history. The tree must have firm roots to anchor it in academic soil. Although the analogy suggests that the roots are primary, it occludes the fact that Schleiermacher derives the knowledge requirements for the roots from the theological subdivisions of historical and practical theology. Only when theology specifies its tasks in view of its particular historical subject matter can it show how its tasks are related to the production of knowledge in other disciplines of the university. Schleiermacher places philosophical theology, the root of Theologie, at the beginning of the discipline’s organization. But he derives its specific theological task from what he has already established in terms of theology’s subject matter of Christianity. The designation of philosophical theology as a conceptual discipline and its location preceding the historical disciplines in theology have caused much interpretative grief since Schleiermacher’s day. Did Schleiermacher ground theology in an alien discipline of philosophy, thereby tainting the purity of Christian revelation with the sin of anthropological categories? Tears can be quickly dried by considering the specific concepts that Schleiermacher uses as examples illustrating his understanding of philosophical theology. The Brief Outline explicitly mentions concepts descriptive of Christian reality, such as revelation (§ 45), and

SCHLEIERMACHER

49

The Christian Faith hones in on the particular definition for Christianity – “the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth” (CF § 11) – as a function of “apologetics.” Definitions of terms for Christianity are the task of “apologetics,” a subdivision of philosophical theology. Apologetics appropriates historical-theological knowledge of Christianity to define its key terms from the perspective of uniqueness, but its task is executed under the assumption that concepts contain a common element for the purpose of comparing Christianity with other religions. Although apologetics precedes the historical-theological section in the Brief Outline, its circumscription of key Christian concepts can only be carried out from the perspective of a sophisticated and comprehensive knowledge of Christianity. The placement of philosophical theology in relation to historical theology can be understood in a way that differs from Barth’s misunderstanding of an alien grounding. Theology, like all other sciences, requires both a dialectical and hermeneutical component. The dialectical component shows how theological thinking is a specific variation of the way humans think in all areas of life and science. It is not an esoteric discipline that has its own logic. The hermeneutical component discloses how specific theological concepts can be communicated to and understood by others outside of the particular religious community under consideration. Concepts not only have a specification within a “language game,” but also must convey a common element in order that those outside the language game might be able to have some grasp of the subject matter. If theology is about reality, it must establish linguistic references to that reality and conceptual designations of how a discussion about that reality can proceed. Only if theology admits that the reality of which it speaks is a shared reality can theology propose any claims to truth about that reality. The task for Theologie as a whole is given by the church in its present situation, while theology’s parts are conceptually derived from the different components required to know a religious community as a living organism existing in history. It now remains for us to see how Schleiermacher presents his system of theology in relation to what he deems to be the historical discipline of knowing the church in its present state. How can historical knowledge be represented by a theological system? The term dogmatische Theologie (“dogmatic theology”) is the word Schleiermacher chooses to specify the genre of his theological writing in The Christian Faith. He appeals to the German term dogmatische Theologie to dissociate his project from the usual eighteenth-century logical construction of “systematic theology” (BO § 195). The new term signals Schleiermacher’s turn to the historical casting of his subject matter – the present state of the church in the history of Christianity – and underscores the historicity of the theologian’s own location in articulating a system of theology. The shift makes an explicit claim regarding theology as a discipline that arises solely from a historical religion. Any fear that Schleiermacher sees theology as an enterprise requiring philosophical buttressing should be allayed by this move classifying systematic

50

CHRISTINE HELMER

theology in historical terms. A quick peek at the sources Schleiermacher gathers in his Christian Faith exposes consistency between prescription and practice. Sources are taken from the Christian Bible (although explicitly cited only in the German critical edition of the text), from early and medieval church authorities, and from confessionally normative sixteenth-century texts. Theology is not derived from philosophically abstract principles, but arises as a discipline in the ongoing discussions of a religion. The question that arises in the wake of Schleiermacher’s revision of systematic theology as a historical enterprise concerning a historical religion is how the historical material is presented in systematic fashion. Various principles for organization are called upon in order to orient the historical claims into a system. In his Brief Outline, Schleiermacher advocates the criteria of coherence (§ 200) that seems to be psychologically anchored by “personal conviction” (§ 196) and comprehensiveness (§ 201). Comprehensiveness is a criterion already hinted at in the Dialektik as a requirement for knowledge. Knowledge is of the totality of reality, and the comprehensiveness of a system exhibits the extent to which the totality of reality has been taken into account. Correspondence consists of the agreement between thought and reality that for Schleiermacher is maintained when theology is attuned to religious history. Coherence is the principle that connects all parts to the whole and to each other. It is the inner core of a system that is unfolded in its parts, and as inner core it is related to the psychological content of the author’s perception of religious reality under historical, cultural, and linguistic conditions. The coherence principle of Schleiermacher’s own Christian Faith is fitting evidence of his personal conviction regarding the redemptive effects of Jesus the Redeemer, as he understands how Jesus is experienced in the category of the psychological structure of consciousness. A look at the table of contents in The Christian Faith gives a clue as to how Schleiermacher uses its coherence principle to organize the historical material. The first division in the table of contents is the “Introduction” to the system in §§ 1–31, which is not to be interpreted as part of the system proper. It is a philosophical-theological introduction to his system, situating the specific concepts of the Christian religion as they have emerged from historical study into relations with the broader enterprise of human thinking, specifically the type of thinking that produces knowledge about human agency in history. It further offers a conceptual comparison of Christianity with the two other monotheistic religions of Islam and Judaism in order to specify the specific determination of consciousness from the perspective of Christian experience. Once the introduction sufficiently describes the psychological structure of consciousness in relation to its specific historical manifestation in Christianity, Schleiermacher can then begin his systematic-theological organization of the specific and soteriologically relevant “faith statements” articulated from a Christian self-consciousness. The system of Schleiermacher’s theology is divided into two main parts. Schleiermacher’s coherence principle provides the justification for the division, with the particular understanding underlined by the introduction that the two

SCHLEIERMACHER

51

parts of consciousness structuring the work must be seen in fundamental unity at all times. Immediate self-consciousness as the self-relation constituting subjectivity that is “felt” rather than known and the historical, cultural, and linguistic dimensions of consciousness never occur in reality apart from each other, although they can be formally distinguished. Part 1 concerns the theological propositions that are related to religious self-consciousness, “which is always both presupposed and contained in every Christian Religious Affection,” while part 2 treats the propositions related to consciousness as determined by the experiences, history, and language integral to Christianity. While part 1 is to be read as an “abstraction” from the Christian consciousness available under the conditions of history, culture, and language, it is not to be interpreted as a dimension of consciousness that could exist independently of Christian – or, for that matter, any other – religious consciousness. The move of abstraction affords Schleiermacher the opportunity to make claims about the doctrine of creation in non-historical terms. Revisions to this doctrine pressed in on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century efforts as evidence mounted against the historicity of the biblical origins of creation and the Fall. By revising the doctrine from a transcendental perspective, theologians could argue for its truth in non-historical terms and avoid seeing the doctrine undermined by historical argument. Schleiermacher’s theological privileging of the doctrine of providence underlines this point. Even if creation were to be stripped of its ontological role in explaining the origins of the world, the doctrine of providence would still be required to articulate the condition of historical existence for the possibility of redemption. From the perspective of the Christian consciousness of redemption, God’s providential governance of the world is read back as its sufficient condition. Part 2 is entitled the “Explication of the Facts of the Religious SelfConsciousness” as shaped from the Christian perspective. It is internally divided into the two determining states that Schleiermacher considers constitutive of Christian experience, sin and grace. Similar to the interchangeability between the two major parts of The Christian Faith, the two sections of part 2 are also not ordered by a logical or temporal priority of sin over grace. When explaining the order, Schleiermacher makes clear that he is not reproducing a Lutheran scheme of Law as logically and temporally anterior to the Gospel. Rather he insists on the priority of the consciousness of redemption as constitutive of Christian selfconsciousness. Only from the perspective of redemption can the severity and destructive capacity of sin be disclosed. According to the order of experience, it is only from the perspective of a state of grace that one experiences sin in the Christian sense as the condition that grace is “redeeming” and “reconciling” (to use Schleiermacher’s two technical terms for the work of Christ). Schleiermacher’s decision to order the sequence from sin to grace reflects, then, not his theological commitment to an order determined by experience but his appropriation of the traditional systematic ordering by the Protestant Orthodoxy dogmatic systems that preceded him.

52

CHRISTINE HELMER

The section on grace is by far the most expansive section in the entire volume. It includes the doctrines of Christ, the Spirit, and the church together with the doctrines of redemption and reconciliation and the “prophetic” (speculative rather than historical) doctrines of eschatology. The organization of the distinct doctrines in this section on grace reveals a deliberate systematic structuring from the particularity of Jesus’ person and work to the constitution of the church by his presence. The relation of church to world is subsequently tracked by doctrines that unfold a history of increasing expansion of the church into the world. At the end, the system’s organization is disclosed as a theology of the history of redemption, beginning with Jesus’ appearance on earth and gradually and inevitably comprehending the world. The God in Christian experience is revealed at the end of the world according to a deep inner essence of love that has guided the history of redemption all along by wisdom. By architecturally assigning the two parts of self-consciousness – immediate self-consciousness as a presupposition for the consciousness that is shaped by history, culture, and language, and the consciousness determined by Christian experience, history, and language – to the two parts of the overall structure, the question emerges as to how Schleiermacher makes systematic use of the three relations in self-consciousness of self, world, and God described in the important §§ 3–4 of the introduction. The answer is Schleiermacher’s architectonic that tracks the development of the Christian consciousness of redemption through each division, part 1 and the two sections of part 2, by three propositions representing the three relations in self-consciousness. As each layer of Christian consciousness is unfolded, a new perspective on the three relations is provided. Schleiermacher considers the propositions expressing the self-relation as felt in immediate self-consciousness as primary; the other two propositions about world and God are derivations. Propositions expressing the world as related to the self and propositions expressing characteristics about God as related to the self are the two other types of propositions. Schleiermacher is not strict about ordering one before the other, as, for example, God occurs before world in part 1 and the world before God in section 1 of part 2. Furthermore the paragraphs concerning the world in section 2 of part 2 are an extended discussion of the relation between church and world as that relation tracks the development of redemption’s expansion in the world. What the system’s “three times three” architectonic accomplishes is an organization of an entire system of theology from the perspective of an analysis of the content of Christian self-consciousness. The system’s form has arisen from the content, and the content is organized by the form. The soteriological orientation of The Christian Faith concludes with the divine attributes of love and wisdom (§§ 165–169). Yet Schleiermacher’s decision to end his system with a discussion of the divine attributes, and then to discuss the doctrine of the Trinity in the final section entitled in German Schluß (in English, “Conclusion”), has caused nothing short of a theological scandal in the twentieth century. The twentieth century, known for its Trinitarian turn in both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies, took offense at Schleiermacher’s allocation

SCHLEIERMACHER

53

of the Trinity to the very conclusion of the system. Did Schleiermacher’s turn to the human subject betray the divine revelation of the Christian God as triune? The criticism is intensified by the fact that some systems of twentieth-century theology were written by taking Karl Barth’s lead in using the Trinity as the systematic structuring principle located at the beginning of his Church Dogmatics. From this twentieth-century perspective, Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-century system seems to treat the Trinity as an “appendix,” tacked on after the important parts of the system have already been exhausted. Whether Schleiermacher’s placement shows new ways of understanding the Christian mystery of God is an important question to be raised. Particularly the question of the novel placement in the system of both doctrines, God and the Trinity, as well as the theological implications of such a placement should be raised for Schleiermacher in the context of the theological concerns, since Thomas Aquinas and through Protestant Orthodoxy, concerning the systematic relations between the doctrines of God, the divine attributes, and the Trinity. The question of ordering presupposes another important issue concerning the relationship of metaphysical descriptions of God (e.g., divine unity or omnipotence) to a description of God available in a concrete historical relationship with this God (e.g., wisdom and love). By ordering one to the other, an explicit claim is made concerning the way attributes derived from reason are related to attributes derived from a historical religion. Depending on the choice of ordering, the divine attributes would be assigned to either a doctrine of a metaphysically determined God or a historically determined God. The issue of systematic arrangement is the key issue at stake in drawing the distinction between a philosophical and a theological determination of God. Schleiermacher’s central concern, heightened by his understanding of theology as a positive science, is to draw a strict boundary between theology and philosophy, much stricter than is evident in the systems of his theological predecessors. Schleiermacher was familiar with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century systems of Protestant Orthodoxy that explicated the doctrine of God by distinguishing between the attributes available through “general revelation,” or reason, and the attributes available through the “special revelation” of redemption in Christ. The Trinity in these systems was placed after the doctrine of God without any explication of how the divine attributes might be conceived in relation to the divine essence of the triune God. Schleiermacher’s methodological commitment to derive theological claims from the expressions of a lived religion had the consequence of eliminating any philosophical or “general” claims of God from the theological system. He explicitly excises rational determinations of God from the dogmatic system (CF § 4.4). The discussion of God and the divine attributes is extended through the system, rather than packed exclusively at the beginning of the system, in order to track the development in the increasing Christian intimate consciousness of God. The system culminates with the description of the divine attributes of wisdom and love. At the end, the “principle of sufficient reason” for redemption discussed in the entire system is revealed.

54

CHRISTINE HELMER

How does this decision to intersperse the system with the doctrine of God help interpret Schleiermacher’s positioning of the Trinity? Two threads are gathered up at the end of The Christian Faith. The revelation of God from the perspective of Christian consciousness is completed by the treatments of love and wisdom. The “conclusion” following this treatment turns to the doctrine of the Trinity (§§ 170–172). A significant portion of these final paragraphs outlines Schleiermacher’s arguments against speculative concerns with the Trinity. On the strictly historical grounds he has set up, there is no place in the system for a discussion of either God or Trinity apart from the way God is related to the consciousness of redemption. The system requires him to place the Trinity at its conclusion because “in so far as [the Trinity] is a deposit of these elements,” namely, the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ and then with the church in the Spirit, the Trinity is to be regarded as the “coping-stone [in the German original, Schlußstein] of Christian doctrine” (CF § 170.1). Its status as a doctrine gleaned from the faith statements about Christ and the Spirit is cumulative, rather than analytic. The Trinity is the culmination of God’s revelation of redemption in history. Yet the Trinity is a “conclusion” to the system, not its climax. Schleiermacher ends his system by opening up the Trinity as a question. “The position assigned to the doctrine of the Trinity in the present work,” Schleiermacher writes, “is perhaps at all events a preliminary step towards this goal” (CF § 172.2). Schleiermacher’s concern with the Trinity is to eliminate the metaphysical and philosophical accretions to the doctrine that had accumulated since its origins. He opens up a research task to clearly separate out biblical and faith statements for the purpose of integrating them into a coherent Trinitarian doctrine, while adopting a critical perspective from which to evaluate the creedal and normative confessional formulations. In particular, he recommends revisiting the historical origins of this doctrine in order to work out new ways of charting its complicated theological and political history. Schleiermacher’s first edition of The Christian Faith was published in biographical proximity to the 1822 publication of his revision of the Trinity’s history.23 Schleiermacher provokes and inspires new directions in the study of the doctrine. It is with a question that he ends his theological system.

Conclusion At the end is no completed eschatology, but a new question that requires the ongoing existence of Christianity in the world to pursue it and to bring it to an end. Schleiermacher’s theology leaves two distinct threads to be gathered up and united only by a history still outstanding in the future. One thread is Schleiermacher’s personal conviction concerning the universal love of God directed by wisdom for the redemption of the world. The other thread is the open question of the Trinity. It is a question for further theological study insofar as it conceptualizes and articulates the way in which the history of God in Christ and

SCHLEIERMACHER

55

in the church is an ongoing story. The history of Christian experience and the historical position of the theologian are open to novel insights and revisions because it is ultimately God’s determination of love and wisdom that drives the story. Perhaps herein lies the meaning of Schleiermacher’s self-designation as a “Herrnhuter of a higher order”: the unity between his personal conviction regarding the universal scope of redemption and the openness to a future of experiencing the love and wisdom which make redemption real.

Notes 1 Schleiermacher was concerned with ecumenically uniting both Lutheran and Reformed traditions in one system of theology. His intention is clearly represented in the lengthy original German title (Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt) that is unfortunately not rendered in the considerably shorter English translation (The Christian Faith). All references to The Christian Faith are from the English translation, ed. H. R. MacKintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. D. M. Baillie (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), and abbreviated in parenthetical citations as CF. 2 Karl Barth’s “Nachwort” is included in the anthology of Schleiermacher’s work: Schleiermacher-Auswahl, ed. Heinz Bolli (Munich: Siebenstern, 1968), 290–312; the English translation is “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher,” trans. George Hunsinger, in The Theology of Schleiermacher:Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24, ed. Dietrich Ritschl (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 261–277. 3 See Schleiermacher’s proposal entitled “Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn,” in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hermann Fischer et al., vol. I/6, ed. Dirk Schmidt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 15–100 (hereafter cited as KGA); as well as proposals by Fichte, Schelling, Steffens, and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Die Idee der deutschen Universität, ed. Ernst Anrich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956); English translation, Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense with an Appendix Regarding a University Soon to be Established, trans. Terrence N. Tice and Edwina Lawler (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1991). 4 Letter from April 5, 1783, in Aus Schleiermacher’s Leben in Briefen, ed. Ludwig Jonas and Wilhelm Dilthey, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (Berlin: Reimer, 1860–1863), 1:294. 5 The German texts discussed in this paragraph are Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Dialektik, ed. Andreas Arndt, in KGA II/10.1–2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002); idem, Dialektik (1822), ed. Rudolf Odebrecht (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs Verlag, 1942; reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976); idem, Dialektik, ed. Ludwig Jonas, in Sämmtliche Werke III/4.2 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1839); idem, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Dialektik, 2 vols., Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft no. 1529 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001).; and idem, Dialectic or, The Art of Doing Philosophy. A Study Edition of the 1811 Notes, trans. Terrence N. Tice (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1996). 6 The critical edition of the text is currently available in two volumes of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe of Schleiermacher’s works published by de Gruyter in Berlin. A more accessible prose rendition of the 1822 notes was written by Rudolf Odebrecht and

56

7

8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

16

17

18

19

CHRISTINE HELMER

published in 1942. A recent two-volume paperback version by Suhrkamp is edited by Manfred Frank. The only edition currently available in English is Terrence Tice’s translation of the earliest 1811 lectures, which were delivered well before the key insight of 1822. Philosophical ethics, for Schleiermacher, is the study of the principles of history: in short, a philosophy of human agency in history. As such, ethics has to do with the fundamental reason-nature relationship that Schleiermacher distinguishes into four areas of human agency: church, academy, politics, and free sociality (freie Geselligkeit). Schleiermacher, Dialektik (1822), in Odebrecht, 270. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5. Bowie’s text is a translation of Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und Kritik, with an appendix of texts from the philosophy of language and introduced by Manfred Frank, 6th ed., Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 211 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977). Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 7. The classic passage is Lindbeck’s classification of Schleiermacher as an “experiential-expressivist.” See George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 16. Schleiermacher appropriates Leibniz’s notion of individual substances as “monads,” but configures them in such a way that they have “windows” to each other. Schleiermacher, Dialektik (1822), in Odebrecht, 270. Still available as Plato, Sämtliche Werke, 10 vols., Insel Taschenbuch 1401–1410 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1991). Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Ueber Kolosser 1, 15–20,” in KGA I/8: 195–226; and English translation by Esther D. Reed and Alan Braley, “On Colossians 1:15–20 (1832),” New Athenaeum/Neues Athenaeum 5 (1998): 48–80. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, ed. and trans. Richard Crouter, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23; and the German original of the first edition is: Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799), ed. Günter Meckenstock (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999). Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums zum Behuf einleitender Vorlesungen (1810/30), ed. Heinrich Scholz, Bibliothek Klassischer Texte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); and English translation is: Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, trans. Terrence N. Tice, Schleiermacher Studies and Translations 1 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1990), 58. (Subsequent references to this translation will be indicated by BO, followed by paragraph number.) The transcript of these lectures by David Friedrich Strauss has been published as Theologische Enzyklopädie (1831/32): Nachschrift von David Friedrich Strauß, ed. Walter Sachs (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1987). Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus, trans. S. Maclean Gilmour, ed. and intro. Jack C. Verheyden, Lives of Jesus series (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress, 1975; reprint, Mifflintown, Pa.: Sigler Press, 1997). Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, trans. James Duke and Francis Fiorenza, AAR Texts and Translations 3 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1981), 59 (second letter).

SCHLEIERMACHER

57

20 David Friedrich Strauss, The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher’s The Life of Jesus, trans. and intro. Leander E. Keck, Lives of Jesus series (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). 21 Verheyden, “Introduction,” in Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus, xxxi. 22 “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.” See index of scriptural citations in the CF for references to Romans 10:17. 23 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über den Gegensatz zwischen der Sabellianischen und der Athanasianischen Vorstellung von der Trinität (1822),” in KGA I/12: 223–306.

Bibliography Helmer, Christine, Christiane Kranich, and Birgit Rehme-Iffert (eds.). Die Liebe zum Wissen: Philosophie und Theologie bei Friedrich Schleiermacher. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. Helmer, Christine, with Marjorie Suchocki, John Quiring, and Katie Goetz (eds.). Schleiermacher and Whitehead: Open Systems in Dialogue. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. Herms, Eilert. Menschsein im Werden: Studien zu Schleiermacher. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Kelsey, Catherine L. Thinking about Christ with Schleiermacher. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2003. Lamm, Julia. Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar. The Journal of Religion 80, no. 2 (2000): 206–239. Mariña, Jacqueline (ed.). Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Mariña, Jacqueline. Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Schleiermacher. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Schmidt, Sarah. Die Konstruktion des Endlichen: Schleiermachers Philosophie der Wechselwirkung. Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie 67. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. Tice, N. Terrence. Schleiermacher. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 3

Hegel David Fergusson

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) can lay claim to being the most influential philosopher of the nineteenth century. Despite the elusiveness of his thought and a complex prose style, Hegel’s work shaped the output of later thinkers as diverse as Strauss, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, and the British idealists. This influence has extended to philosophy and theology well into the twentieth century. Even where his philosophical presuppositions have not been adopted, his conceptuality, insights, and argumentation have continued to shape the articulation of Christian thought, especially the doctrine of the Trinity.

Intellectual Formation The son of a Württemburg civil servant, Hegel was educated at the Gymnasium in Stuttgart and the Evangelische Stift at Tübingen with the intention of entering the Lutheran ministry.1 His student contemporaries included Schelling and Hölderlin. On completion of his studies, Hegel did not seek ordination but worked as a private tutor in Berne and Frankfurt before taking up a post in 1799 at the University of Jena. During this time he completed the Phenomenology of Spirit. On leaving Jena in 1808, he worked as rector of a school in Nuremberg before his appointment in 1816 to a chair of philosophy in Heidelberg University. Two years later he moved to Berlin, where his reputation spread through his teaching and writings. He became a leading intellectual figure in the city. Following his sudden death in 1831 during a cholera epidemic in Berlin, there was widespread demand for the publication of his lectures and notebooks, including the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Hegel’s early intellectual development adumbrates the later philosophical work.2 His theological interests are reflected throughout his writings, which achieve a fusion of philosophy and Christian theology unrivaled in modern

HEGEL

59

times. As a student in Tübingen, Hegel became dissatisfied with the stuffy orthodoxy of his teachers. He read widely and independently, developing an interest in Greek culture and the Swabian mystics alongside a sympathy with the moral ideals of the French Revolution. His philosophy was profoundly aware of the difficulties facing Christian intellectuals in the Enlightenment. These included the problem of reconciling revelation to reason, the relationship of Christianity to other religions, the veracity of reported miracles, and the historical challenge to the claims of Scripture. In Hegel’s mature thought, we find an attempted resolution of all these issues. Interest in an authentic folk religion is revealed in Hegel’s fascination with Greek culture. The religious aspiration should manifest itself in social life; it must seek expression in the practices of a community. In binding the members of society, religion has an integrative function with respect to science, art, ethics, philosophy, and politics. His interest in mysticism is reflected in the philosophical conviction that the goal of all striving is the presence of God indwelling all things. One might equally well claim that it is all things indwelling God. Hegel was often accused of pantheism, although he would counter this with the claim that it was a notion without exact meaning and thus an empty charge. Yet it is clear that the unity of God and the world is the goal of history for Hegel. The striving for reconciliation and self-expression is the dynamic force of creation: “All the distinctions of the arts and sciences and of the endless interweavings of human relationships, habits and customs, activities, skills, and enjoyments find their ultimate center in the one thought of God. God is the beginning of all things and the end of all things; everything starts from God and returns to God.”3 Hegel’s attention to Christian doctrine is apparent in several recurring themes in his philosophy. In particular, the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation are central to his description of religion in relation to philosophy, even if their treatment must be adjudged heterodox. Moreover, the philosophical significance Hegel attaches to history is derived from his Christian inheritance.

Idealism Hegel’s philosophy can be approached by assessing his reaction to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Kant’s distinction between the world of noumena (things in themselves) and the world of phenomena (appearances) attracted the criticism of later thinkers. It was unsustainable, in part because things in themselves could only be affirmed as they were known. How, then, could we posit the existence of a determinate world the contents of which remained unknowable? Along with Fichte and Schelling, Hegel rejected Kant’s notion of an unknowable, mind-independent world. We can only know of the existence of a thing as it is brought to consciousness. From this, it is further claimed that mind and its contents are all that there is. Kantian dualism is

60

DAVID FERGUSSON

thus overcome by denying the independent world of things in themselves. This is the standard epistemological setting of idealism. Moreover, a similar tension in Kant’s philosophy afflicted the human subject who seemed to inhabit both worlds. In his ethics, Kant had drawn a distinction between the prescriptions of desire and those of reason. Both the mind and the will were thus divided between two worlds. As a free and rational moral agent, the self was noumenal; but as a determined sensuous being, it also resided in the world of phenomena. Only by re-introducing God was Kant able to integrate human striving for happiness and our obligation to obey the moral law. For Hegel, however, the moral self must seek fulfillment not in some distant eschatological future but in the everyday world of family life, civil society, and church. This is the realm in which human freedom finds self-expression. At the center of Hegel’s philosophy is an account of logic in which the identity of a thing (what it is) is constituted by its relations to other things (what it is not). In the Science of Logic (1812),4 the act of thinking is necessarily thinking about something. This gives rise to the general, undifferentiated notion of “being,” the sense that something “is.” Yet through the lack of determinacy, this thought is hard to differentiate from the related notion of “nothing.” The transition of thought from being to nothing must move back again toward being. This movement can be described as a “becoming” in which a measure of determinacy emerges. Here we have the logical form of that dialectical process central to Hegel’s understanding of politics, ethics, and religion. The formal analysis of concepts reveals that the identity of a thing can only be known through its relation to other things. Only as we know how it is related to what it is not do we come to know it in itself. Against the atomism of earlier empiricist and rationalist thinkers, Hegel argues that reality is a continuum rather than an aggregate of disparate entities. The identity of one thing includes its total set of relations to all other things. Thus identity can only unfold as these relations are revealed. In this respect, relations are internal rather than external to a concept. Three implications of this account are worth registering. The first is the manner in which identity unfolds through thought. For Hegel, the intellectual subject does not impose a conceptual structure upon the raw materials of the external world. This seems to be the way of Kant’s critical philosophy. Instead, Hegel understands the world to disclose itself, even to emerge, as it is thought by us. The subject does not control or organize the way things are, so much as allow these to come to consciousness through the act of thinking. In this respect, the rational order of the world is immanent and emergent. The significance of this for Hegel’s philosophy can hardly be underestimated. It indicates that human subjectivity is that through which the world unfolds as it is brought to consciousness. Yet our minds do not create the world so much as act as the means by which it comes to know itself. Second, this becomes central to construing the relationship between human and divine reality. In Hegel’s system, God (Absolute Spirit) comes to selfknowledge through the actions of finite minds or spirit. And, third, in describing the emergent nature of the world as it is understood, Hegel is able to perceive

HEGEL

61

history as possessing a deep philosophical significance. Doubtless this owes much to his Christian theological heritage, but in the history of western philosophy this can be regarded as something of a novelty. Prior to Hegel, none of the leading philosophers (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, or Kant) had devoted sustained attention to history as the medium of philosophical truth.5 While Hegel’s logic and epistemology engage with some of the more abstract philosophical issues discussed by Kant, the approach he adopts is important also for his account of ethics and history. In conceptual thought, we already see the dialectical striving of the human subject toward freedom and integration. In knowing the world, the subject becomes conscious of itself. Yet to be properly self-conscious it must be related to other selves. To realize one’s identity, one must be recognized and acknowledged by others. Self-esteem is reciprocally related to being esteemed by others. At times, we have to prove ourselves before others, whether as individuals or as nations. For Hegel, a nation must sometimes command self-respect by overthrowing another through the waging of war. His treatment of the master–slave (lord–bondsman) relationship in the Phenomenology of Spirit6 is much discussed in this context. Although inevitable in human affairs, this relationship is inherently unstable; it must be superseded by mutual acknowledgment and respect. In dominating the other, the master achieves recognition. Yet since this is coerced, it is limited and rendered unsatisfactory – the slave does not offer recognition freely. Furthermore, the slave in laboring for his master steadily becomes more self-conscious, although this is limited by his status as an object of control by the master. This creates the phenomenon of the unhappy or divided consciousness. Frustrated by the shortcomings of the relationship, master and slave retreat into themselves and their own peculiar activities; for the slave this is work, and for the master vanishing enjoyment. (Hegel regards the slave as having the advantage in this respect.) Their relating is one-sided and unequal; neither can give the other what consciousness seeks. In doing so, they abandon the prospect of fulfillment in relationship. The desire for integration is suppressed or diverted. Yet all consciousness struggles for both freedom and fulfillment (reconciliation). Only in a union of free and equal persons can the limitations of the master–slave relationship be overcome. This of course has political consequences. It requires a liberal society committed to the freedom and equality of all citizens, yet one which is also shaped by institutions of civil society which make genuine social integration possible. Nevertheless, Hegel’s analysis here may imply that imperialism and colonialism are necessary moments in the development of civilization. The key to understanding ethics and politics is the struggle for freedom. This is properly exercised not in an unbridled series of choices lacking in direction or purpose. Here the will is determined by random, arbitrary desires and whims. Choice is conditioned by factors extrinsic to free will itself. (One might discern at this juncture a criticism of aspects of the free market and consumer society.) Instead, to become more fully self-limited, the will must find its freedom in ends which are in accordance with its nature as this gradually unfolds. This comes

62

DAVID FERGUSSON

about through respect for the rights of others as these are established by the laws of the state and the institutions of civil society. Hegel can be rescued from the charge of promoting a form of authoritarian politics by attending to the ways in which freedom is to be realized socially. Like Rousseau and Kant before him, he affirms that free will must resolve to will only its own freedom. In doing so, it becomes a self-legislating will. This involves, however, the regulation of one’s natural desires by entering into commitments and obligations in ways that respect the rights of each and everyone. These include the rights to property, engagement in economic activity, and freedom from enslavement to another. Such rights must be protected by a system of law that treats all citizens equally and impartially. By owning and acknowledging the customs and laws of society, the self becomes free. Freedom is thus constructed positively rather than negatively. It is freedom for self-realization. The self comes to be at home in the community through observing moral rules and social customs. In doing so, it finds its freedom and realizes its identity. Yet this is never fully settled or complete. Freedom is also limited by our inability always to act ethically, by the unequal outcomes of economic activity, and by the threat posed to each state by war and conquest. And in search of absolute freedom and truth, spirit must also attend to the spheres of art, religion, and philosophy.

Philosophical Theology Hegel’s theology was formulated in conscious opposition to the deism of earlier Enlightenment thinkers, to Kant’s reduction of religion to an aid to moral performance, and to Schleiermacher’s (perceived) grounding of religion in subjective feeling. Moreover, it eschewed a return to the rationalist tradition which stressed the transcendence of the impassible God over against the finite, contingent creation. The key concept in Hegel’s theology is that of spirit (Geist). It has several connotations that render it appropriate for his purpose. Lacking the more static sense of “substance” or “being,” spirit denotes movement, energy, and dynamism. Its religious use, particularly in Hebrew and Greek, suggests that it is expressed in living forms. For Hegel, spirit is essentially self-communicating. It must reveal and reconcile itself to what it is not. Only by so doing does it become fully expressed and achieve its identity as spirit. Thus, although including mental activity, spirit is not reducible to the operations of the intellect alone. Its field encompasses nature and history. To this extent, Geist is better translated as “spirit” than “mind.” Hegel also distinguishes between absolute and finite spirit. This is a critical distinction in his account of religion. The relationship to everything which is not spirit is internal to the identity of absolute spirit. “It is the whole which embraces all otherness, everything finite and determinate, within itself.”7 By internalizing relatedness in this way, absolute spirit becomes limited only by its own self. As only self-limited, therefore, it emerges as free and infinite. Absolute spirit may be thought of as God, although it is important to understand that God’s identity is

HEGEL

63

only expressed in relationship to the world. As traditionally conceived, the aseity of God is not a feature of Hegel’s theology. By contrast, finite spirit perceives otherness as distinct from itself and apart from its own identity. It is limited by the not-self. In this way it is finite and its freedom is curtailed. Generating a struggle for freedom and fulfillment, finite spirit only achieves its goal by a sublation (Aufhebung) in which it is abolished, yet surpassed by absolute spirit.8 The three forms of absolute spirit are located in art, religion, and philosophy. “[T]he beautiful is characterised as the pure appearance of the Idea to sense.”9 For Hegel, the idea (Idee) is the objective form in which the concept (Begriff) relates itself to itself. Thus in art the truth is here apprehended in sensuous external form, yet as appearance it is not yet a full conceptual disclosure.10 The function of art is not simply to imitate the natural world but to discover in it an order, unity, and wholeness: “Genuine art for Hegel, does not present us with things as they are in ordinary experience, it idealises them by investing their natural form with grace, balance and proportion which are not encountered in such a pure form in nature itself.”11 In doing so, art reconciles the aesthetic subject with the natural world of sensuous experience through the representations of sculpture, painting, drama, literature, or music. In religion, these forms gradually become internalized in the attempt to characterize the Absolute and our relation to it. Nonetheless, religion must continue to use images or representations to describe its object. The stories of the Bible and the classical doctrines of the Christian faith are to be understood in this way. Their inner, rational connections can be set out only by philosophy. The stress on divine knowability sets Hegel apart from some of his anti-Enlightenment contemporaries, including Jacobi or Schleiermacher. A religion of pure feeling denies the essence of God as knowable and communicable. God is God in the divine self-knowledge, and it is in our human knowledge of God that God is able to know God’s own self. Yet this knowledge requires an overcoming of our estrangement from God, a longing for union and reconciliation. In this respect, there is also in Hegel a reaction against the over-intellectualized religion of the rationalists. Here a distinction must be made between an old-style natural theology and what Hegel regards as a proper philosophy of religion. Philosophy has the task of interpreting in rational concepts (Begriffe) the images (Vorstellungen) of religion; to this extent, it surpasses the latter by bringing it to a truer rational understanding. Yet philosophy does not bring about the demise of religion even when it has reached this stage of development. The practical dimension of religion is stressed in his recognition of the significance of cult. In the Eucharist, for example, our existential separation from God is overcome in a double movement toward God and from God. Defending a Lutheran interpretation of the real presence of Christ in the elements, Hegel argues against (as he sees it) the externality of the Roman Catholic theory of transubstantiation and the more symbolic or spiritual account favored by the Reformed churches. Hegel appears to hold to the indispensability of religion on several fronts. The division of labor in modern societies prevents everyone from attaining

64

DAVID FERGUSSON

philosophical understanding. The symbols and practices of religion will continue to provide more immediate access to God. Moreover, it seems that the function of religion in engaging will and heart should continue to be important even for the philosopher whose mind has learned how to interpret religious representations and forces. Besides this, Hegel seems also to have resisted any assimilation of the institutions of religion to those of the state and civil society. Not every member of a free society can be expected to subscribe to the same faith. In this respect, civil religion is resisted: there is to be no return to a pre-modern (or early-modern) confessional state. At the same time, religion transcends particular political societies: the kingdom of God is a universal community which can unite races, nations, and peoples. In all these respects, then, religion continues to exercise a practical function even after it has been intellectually surpassed by philosophy.

Christian Doctrine The doctrines of the Christian faith are (re)interpreted in light of fundamental Hegelian themes. The dialectical movement in Hegel’s philosophy from thesis to antithesis to synthesis suggests a triadic pattern for which the doctrine of the Trinity proves highly congenial. In begetting the Son, the Father goes forth into another. There is then a return to the Father in the union of a third, the Holy Spirit. This peculiarly Christian dogma grasps the movement and self-differentiation in God which leads to a return in unity, a coming to itself in a reconciliation and fulfillment of being. In the creeds this is presented in the pictorial form of the Father begetting the Son, and of the Spirit proceeding from the Father (and the Son) before the creation of the world. The task of philosophy is rationally to explain, even to demythologize, this imagery. Creation is depicted as a free act of the divine will in which the world is called into being from out of nothing. But this too is a picture or image which must be understood in terms of the need for Geist to become embodied in order to realize itself. Closely related to this is the idea of the Fall. This is presented not as a voluntary and accidental perversion of human freedom but as an inevitable ascent into a creaturely self-assertion and estrangement which are necessary for that higher reconciliation of God and the world to be accomplished. The incarnation is likewise a central religious notion for Hegel. It is the high point in the historical development of religion, for here in the person of Christ is represented the reconciliation of God and the world. In the consciousness of one person, our identity with God and as God is realized. Yet this union or reconciliation is not finally for one person alone; it is for everyone. So Christ must die, and in being raised from the dead, his spirit comes to consciousness in the life of the Christian community. Good Friday must be borne for the sake of Pentecost. In the church, the union of the divine and human is realized in religious (if not in philosophical) form in the story of the descent of the Spirit upon the whole community.

HEGEL

65

Hegel’s doctrinal explorations are often subtle and inspiring, particularly in the extended and elaborate treatment provided in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. His philosophical readings of classical dogma cannot simply be dismissed as Procrustean or reductive. These display a sensitivity to patterns of Christian thought which suggest movement, life, and temporality in the being of God over against more static conceptions of divine impassibility and immutability. In addition, Hegel’s doctrinal thought is faithful to his conviction that it is only through historical forces and movements of thought that Spirit can be discerned. Christian doctrine retains its function and vitality even in an age of enlightenment. It is neither to be consigned to a pre-critical, infantilized thought world, nor is it simply to be replaced by a mature worldview for which such images have ceased to be necessary. Nevertheless, one cannot avoid the conclusion that his readings of Christian dogma create a significant loss of traditional convictions. Highly unorthodox, his Trinitarian doctrine resolves the distinction between Father and Son through their both being superseded by the Spirit. Instead of three co-equal, co-eternal, consubstantial persons, we are faced with a dialectical progression toward the advent of the Spirit as the final form of God. In asserting the ontological necessity of creation, Hegel undercuts the notions of divine transcendence and freedom which both inform much Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinking about the world in relation to God and also enable discourse about divine grace.12 Alongside this, the doctrine of the Fall seems to equate finitude and sin, perceiving the latter as necessary if the former is to be overcome. With the need for an eventual overcoming of the God–world distinction, there is the prospect of a resultant loss of creaturely identity as we are absorbed into the divine life. Perhaps of even greater interest is Hegel’s treatment of Jesus. In affirming the incarnation, he appears to suggest that one historical individual achieved a reconciliation with God in advance of others. Yet this must surely be perceived as picture thinking, for such an instance cannot be accommodated within the dialectical and evolutionary patterns of world history to which Hegel is everywhere committed. It is in the nature of neither God nor ourselves for this to be possible. Furthermore, on this account the resurrection of Jesus tends to be understood in terms of the transmission of his spirit to the life of the church. Lutheran accounts of the ubiquity of Christ’s body notwithstanding, it is not so much that Jesus continues to own his own presence, as in standard accounts of the resurrection and ascension. Instead, the life of Jesus is extended and surpassed by the life of the community conscious of its oneness with that spirit he embodied. Yet despite this reductive account of the resurrection, Hegel remains committed to the historical figure of Jesus and his significance for religion. Charles Taylor suggests that “although Hegel probably continued to see in Jesus an exceptional individual who lived in harmony with God in a way quite without precedent or equal in his time it could not be said of him that he was God in any sense other than that in which we are all identical with God.”13 As we shall presently note, this places the master somewhere between right-wing and left-wing Hegelians.

66

DAVID FERGUSSON

World Religions In assessing Christianity as the absolute religion, Hegel attempts to place it dialectically in relation to other faiths. While his descriptions – variant readings of the world religions are offered in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the later Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion – have now been overtaken by developments in the study of the history of religions, his work nonetheless shows an impressive attention to detail and sources. He discerns a progression of religious forms in the ancient world with Christianity surpassing in different ways both Judaism and Greco-Roman religion. This process had already begun in even older cultures – Chinese, Indian, Persian, Syrian, and Egyptian. Here a dialectic can be observed between notions of God in pure, undifferentiated forms and depictions of God as embodied in particular objects. Thus, in Indian religion, he finds the absolute asserted as beyond all conceptual determination while deities are manifested in a plethora of natural forms. As the history of religion advances, immediate or natural religion is succeeded by a religion of spiritual individuality or subjectivity. At this stage, the subject can exist for itself as a spiritual being. Its spiritual nature thus comes to selfconsciousness. Hegel claims that this religion of spiritual individuality can take two different forms. In the first, there is one transcendent God who exists over against everything else. In the second, there is a union of the spiritual with the natural by which the latter provides corporeal expression of the consciousness of the former. These two forms are identified respectively with Judaism and Greek religion in which the free subjectivity of God comes to expression. Both are inadequate, albeit for different reasons. The Jewish stress on the transcendence and otherness of God marks a particular stage in the development of religion through its focus upon the free lordship of God as Spirit. In Judaism, the one God is presented as radically other. The world is the result of a free act of creation, and in its history God appears as an agent with plans and goals for creaturely servants. The world is desacralized by this distinction between creation and creator, while also becoming the arena for miraculous action. However, with Judaism the purposes of God tend to be local and particular. One tribe or nation is exclusively chosen and bound to God. Israel must serve God obediently as a consequence of divine heteronomy. Hegel remarks that “it is his submission and renunciation that justify Job in that he recognises the boundless power of God.”14 Yet this creates a gap between human potential and religious reality. Reconciliation is never attained. For Hegel, the obedience here required is blind and determinate, as opposed to the spiritual freedom of the truly ethical person. On the whole, this is a negative and supersessionist account of Judaism. It is presented both as a temporary and limited stage of religious development, and also as the negative counterpoint of Christianity, which offers the universality and reconciliation which Hegel perceives to be lacking in the mother religion.

HEGEL

67

It can be located in a long European tradition of distorted characterization of Jews in negative stereotypes and tropes. Taylor claims “that the whole negative side of (Hegel’s) judgement on the religion of unhappy consciousness is discharged onto Judaism.”15 Other commentators have argued that Hegel’s tendency to caricature Judaism is better explained by his love of Greek culture, which is generally presented in more positive and sympathetic terms.16 Hegel’s account of Judaism is problematic both for Christian theology and for the study of religion. Its tendency to distance the religion of the incarnation from its Jewish roots creates difficulties for his account of Jesus’ teaching (which cannot be explained except in positive relation to Hebraic traditions), the canonicity of the Old Testament (which requires that the Jewish stress on divine transcendence and the otherness of creation be retained in Christian faith), and the doctrine of the Trinity (whereby the three persons are consubstantial and co-eternal, rather than progressing dialectically toward the divine self-realization as Spirit). Within the history of religion, Hegel also has a severe problem in positioning Islam. If Christianity is the absolute religion which surpasses its Jewish and Greek antecedents, then why does Islam appear and flourish at a later date? Hegel tends to assimilate it to his treatment of Judaism since it shares a similar stress on divine transcendence and its links to a particular ethnic group. Yet this hardly explains the missionary expansion of Islam and its emergence as a world religion, features which are more akin to those of Christianity than those of Judaism. Religion in the form of art appears for Hegel in its most developed phase in the culture of ancient Greece, a source of considerable attraction to him. Here the reconciliation and unity craved by Judaism are achieved, although in a limited, parochial scope. This is illustrated by the plurality of gods appearing in human form. Here the artificer of Egyptian religion, the builder or sculptor, has become a spiritual worker. A unity can be discerned between human nature and society. There is an integration of self, world, and community. This reconciliation for the Greeks is reflected in the appearance of the gods in human form. Yet there remains a parochial limitation to this religion. It is destined to be replaced as spirit strives for a more universal consciousness and unity. Only within the city state can the individual become united with other citizens; there is no universal fellowship. The plurality of divinities is a sign of fragmentation, as is their boundedness by forces of fortune and fate. This notwithstanding, there is genuine reconciliation in the Greek city state where the citizen identifies with the customs of the community. The religion of beauty is enacted in festivals and ceremonies. Not only the work of the sculptor but also the living form of the athlete embody the unity of nature with beauty and grace. The fate discerned in tragedy, however, reveals the temporary restriction upon the measure of unity and reconciliation enjoyed. The dialectical tension between subjectivity and necessity leads to the dissolution of both city state and religion. This gives way to the Roman Empire, more universal in its scope but with a religion that, according to Hegel, is enforced and external to our inner needs. The loss of unity with God through the breakdown of the temporary reconciliation achieved by the Greek polis

68

DAVID FERGUSSON

becomes the mirror image of Jewish alienation from the transcendent God. Only with the religion of the incarnation are these traumas resolved. The initial appearance of the church in history is within an indifferent or even hostile society. Only as the Christian religion progresses does it achieve some unity with the world through the conversion of the emperor and the civilizing of barbarian lands. Ecclesiastical history must be interpreted by Hegel in dialectical terms. From an early period of opposition to the world, the church moves to a time of worldly power and domination. This is the medieval ideal of Christendom, but here the objects of religion are largely externalized in rites and relics, a phenomenon which provokes the negative reaction of monasticism. Only with the coming of the Reformation is there a reassertion of the individual spirit, yet this is also set within the context of confessional states (at least for the magisterial Reformation) which manage some integration of personal faith and institutional form. The turn to the individual and the affirmation of freedom in the Reformation lead inexorably to the Enlightenment with its commitment to autonomy, free enquiry, and the overthrowing of external sources of authority. Yet Hegel does not end here. The rise of deism with its externalizing of God indicates the religious deficiency of the Enlightenment. The human spirit must find itself in union with that greater, universal spirit which we call God. A true philosophy is now needed which will draw together pure religion and human understanding. “The goal of philosophy is the cognition of the truth – the cognition of God because God is the absolute truth…. The Enlightenment – that vanity of understanding – is the most vehement opponent of philosophy. It takes it very ill when philosophy demonstrates the rational content in the Christian religion, when it shows that the witness of the Spirit, the truth in the most all-embracing senses of the term, is deposited in religion.”17 Although Hegel perceives philosophical thought as surpassing religion through its replacement of images by concepts, his own philosophy remains thoroughly theological. In this respect, Hegel’s work, while cherishing the rationalism and human autonomy valued by Enlightenment thinkers, returns to God. And although he eschews the skepticism and atheism of other Enlightenment thinkers, he avoids the anti-rationalism of some Romantic and mystical approaches to (immediate) religion, including that of Schleiermacher, to whom he was deeply unsympathetic. God does not return by our going around or behind the Enlightenment. In Hegel’s philosophy, it is reason that must restore God to the center of things. The history of philosophy itself must be understood in terms of the dialectical process of history, and Hegel sees his own philosophy of spirit as the right and inevitable outcome of the history of the discipline. The absolute Spirit must come to itself through its being thought in and by us. A new era now emerges in which Spirit’s identity has become clear. This universal awakening represents something approaching the goal of world history. Both the negative trends of the Enlightenment and the irrationalism of Romantic religion must be resisted by the philosophy of Spirit. In doing so, it can unite reason and revelation, God and world, and thought and action.

HEGEL

69

The Hegelians In one rather obvious way, Hegel’s thesis was falsified, or at least rendered in need of qualification, by the subsequent history of philosophy and theology. The lack of an overwhelming consensus in favor of his position suggested that philosophy had not reached the final point of its evolution. The presence of radical disagreement called into question the historical optimism of his position, and even in his own later writings one senses some pessimism regarding the future of philosophy and history. During his own lifetime, Hegel’s work not only commanded wide support but also provoked varied forms of opposition. These trends continued after his lifetime and led to a polarization of views which eventually brought about the dissolution in the 1840s of the syntheses he offered between reason and revelation, religion and philosophy, and church and society. Nonetheless, his engagement with theologians and church leaders discloses the extent to which he sought not to replace religion but only to bring its claims to a higher form of understanding. The communal activity of the church is not rendered obsolete so much as set within the new light of philosophical consciousness. Throughout the 1820s, Hegel’s attempt to distinguish his position from competing alternatives signifies a debate already underway in German society. The attempt to integrate the revealed truths of Christianity with the speculative reasoning of philosophy distances Hegel both from rationalist orthodoxy and from anti-rationalist theologies of feeling. Much of what Hegel writes is consciously directed at the teaching of Schleiermacher, his theological colleague in Berlin. Occasioning a lively public debate, Hegel’s program attracted support, yet even amongst his followers anxieties can be detected. One concern surrounded the apparent distortion of the central doctrinal themes of Christian theology. The necessity of creation, the drive toward a unitarianism of the third person of the Trinity, the incarnation as a religious symbol – all these prevented orthodox theologians, otherwise sympathetic to Hegel’s attempt to integrate philosophy and theology, from an unqualified commitment to his system. In The Life of Jesus (1835), a book that is sometimes viewed as marking the split within the Hegelian school, David Friedrich Strauss distinguished right-wing from left-wing Hegelianism. On the right were those who maintained the traditional doctrine of the person of Christ (two natures in one person), while on the left were skeptics who doubted both the historical veracity of the gospel record and traditional dogma. Situated somewhere in the Hegelian middle were those who steered a mediating course. Although Strauss’s division was somewhat restricted by Christological criteria, his categories have persisted in subsequent descriptions of Hegel’s school. The right-wing or Old Hegelians are identified as those who sought to avoid impressions of pantheism by maintaining ideas of a personal God, individual immortality, and historical revelation. These included early disciples of Hegel such as F. W. Carové (1789–1852) and F. W. Hinrichs (1794–1861). It is

70

DAVID FERGUSSON

against this strain of Hegelianism that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) reacted so violently in Lutheran Denmark. On the Hegelian left was a radical intellectual and political grouping who sought the translation of Hegel’s insights into practical outcomes. Reacting against the intellectualism of his philosophy, they sought a greater degree of empirical application from philosophy. This led to the emergence of a more critical attitude to religion in the work of Strauss (1808–1874), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), and Karl Marx (1818–1883). Thus, in Feuerbach’s work there is a secularizing or humanizing of Hegel’s philosophy by which theology becomes subordinated to anthropology. Already in 1828, Feuerbach had written to Hegel in terms which indicate a significant departure from his teacher’s thought.18 The subject of striving is our sensuous nature which seeks its fulfillment in the natural world. This can come about not through the re-assertion of Christianity as the absolute religion but through a new era of world history in which Hegel’s theology is broadened through its being secularized. In signaling his departure from Hegel’s intentions, Feuerbach’s work reveals the manner in which the left wing had departed from Hegelianism by the 1840s. In part, the demise of Hegel’s own program may have been the consequence of a polarization of positions which evacuated the middle ground that he and several theological followers – K. Daub (1765–1836), P. K. Marheineke (1780– 1846), and F. C. Baur (1792–1860) – had sought to occupy. With both the reassertion of Christian orthodoxy on the right and the secularization of theology in the hands of the left-wing Hegelians, public support for Hegel’s program of scientific theology was eroded. Nevertheless, later in the nineteenth century Hegel’s philosophy continued to arouse interest and to be appropriated in different ways around Europe and North America. In Britain, there was little initial enthusiasm for Hegel partly due to the anti-speculative nature of philosophical work in England and Scotland, but perhaps also because Hegel’s work had been tainted by the (somewhat vague) charge of pantheism. Yet this was to change in the second half of the nineteenth century, ironically at a time when Hegelianism had largely collapsed in Germany. In 1855, an English translation of Hegel appeared with the publication of part of his Science of Logic.19 The first major study of Hegel in English was James Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel, Being the Hegelian-System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter, the two volumes of which were published in London in 1865. Stirling viewed Hegel’s philosophy as the necessary development of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Instead of positing an unknown world of things in themselves, Hegel understands the universal principles of the understanding as bringing to our consciousness the real world, as “the diamond net which by its invisible meshes encloses, not the veil that conceals, the real world.”20 While offering an enthusiastic endorsement of Hegel’s philosophy, Stirling’s work, like that of his master, was difficult if not impenetrable. It was remarked at the time that if Stirling knew the secret of Hegel, he had managed to keep it to himself.21 Yet his book precipitated a stream of translations and further discussions of Hegel from philosophers including T. H. Green (1836–1882), John Caird (1820–1898), Edward Caird

HEGEL

71

(1835–1908), Henry Jones (1852–1922), F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923). Thus British idealism flourished as a movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in Glasgow and Oxford (mainly at Balliol). Largely preoccupied with issues relating to epistemology, perception, science, and art, the idealists saw Hegel’s work in relation to problems inherent in Kant. This philosophy was also allied to a keen interest in political and social reform through enhancing the role of the state in the late Victorian period.22 In the work of the Oxford philosopher T. H. Green, we find the development of an idealist system that reveals significant Hegelian influences.23 Our awareness of an orderly and intelligible world requires the existence of an enduring subject or consciousness which organizes sensory experience. According to the same principle, the world itself must be sustained and organized by an overriding “spiritual principle.” How this relates to individual subjects is not always clear, but it seems that the “Eternal Spiritual Principle” must reproduce itself in the emergence of finite minds. Accordingly, Green views historical progress in terms of the process by which spirit (the spiritual principle) attains greater fulfillment. Green’s progressive understanding of history informed his political thought – he was the first active university teacher to serve on the Oxford Town Council. Reposing on a moral basis, the state had a duty to promote the freedom of its individual citizens. This end, however, required a criticism of laissez-faire economics leading to some anticipation in Green’s work of the welfare state. Green’s theological commitments seem largely to have been accommodated to his philosophical convictions. While remaining within the Church of England, he criticized scriptural infallibility and doctrinal rigidity. The relevance of Christianity seems instead to have resided in the “essentially spiritual nature of all existence and our mission to be the instruments of some divine process.”24 John Caird, the Glasgow theologian, offers a more determined effort to integrate Hegelian themes with classical Christian dogma. Belonging to the established Church of Scotland, Caird’s sympathies were catholic, tolerant, and politically progressive. Like Green, he was actively involved in social reform and enlisted church support for a deeper understanding of the causes of poverty. In this and other ways, he played an important part in the renewal of Scottish church life in the late Victorian period.25 Although influenced by Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, Caird’s theology attempted a more orthodox appropriation of this than did that of his younger brother Edward Caird, who held the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow before becoming Master of Balliol College, Oxford. This is most apparent in his two volumes of Gifford lectures, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity. In describing the relation of the world to God, John Caird discusses two propositions at some length. The first is that infinite Spirit or Mind constitutes the reality of the external world. In Kantian mode, he argues for the conditioning powers of the mind. We bring to sensation various organizing and processing principles. However, the sense that nature persists when not experienced or known by us is

72

DAVID FERGUSSON

guaranteed by the principle that it exists by virtue of an intelligence neither imperfect nor transient in which everything has its being. (This resembles a Berkleian defense of idealism.) The same principle applies also to our finite minds and their operations. These presuppose an Absolute Intelligence. Indeed, Caird even remarks that “all intellectual and spiritual progress may be said to be measured by the degree in which we cease to think our own thoughts, abnegate all self-assertion, and let our minds become the pure media of the universal and absolute intelligence.”26 Caird’s second proposition is that the idea of God involves or demands the existence of a finite world. Here he argues that God fulfills the divine self in the existence of the world and in the spiritual life and destiny of human persons.27 There is both a divine element in us and a human element in God. All art, science, morality, and religion rest upon a divine ideal which provides the standard and criterion of truth and judgment. Yet that divine ideal is only realized in us. Its presence in God demands a world in which it is instantiated. God as subject requires a world as object. Love must give itself away in suffering, sacrifice, and union with the other. The Christian idea of the Logos or Son of God implies the self-communication of God and the making of others in the divine image. Knowledge takes us far beyond ourselves, but also deeper into ourselves and into God: “As part of an intelligible world, every object which intelligence contemplates is its own object; and as it enters into knowledge and yields up its essence to the mind that lays hold of it, it becomes for that mind a revelation of its own latent wealth, or rather of its capacity for participating in the wealth of the Mind for and in which all things have their being.”28 A question that arises is whether the distinctiveness of human personality is overwhelmed in this process.29 Is there resurrection, or only absorption into the divine life? “Religion is the absolute self-surrender of the soul to God. It means the giving up or annulling of the private, particular self, of every interest or satisfaction that belongs to me as this particular individuality, and the blending or identification of my will, and potentially of my whole life and being, with the will of the Infinite.”30 The decline of British idealism is dated most readily from the time of the First World War. The shattering of late-Victorian and Edwardian optimism by the traumas of the war rendered anachronistic any account of steady historical progress. By then, however, English-language philosophy had already returned to realism and a more piecemeal approach to philosophical enquiry in the work of G. E. Moore (1873–1958), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), although neo-Kantian idealism continued to flourish for a time in Germany in the work of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) and Paul Natorp (1854–1924). As Geoffrey Warnock has pointed out, idealism declined not so much because it was decisively defeated but because a younger group of philosophers generated interest in a fresh set of topics, thus abandoning older patterns of thought that quickly seemed arcane and outmoded: “Metaphysical systems do not yield, as a rule, to frontal attack…. Such systems are more vulnerable to ennui than to disproof. They are citadels, much shot at

HEGEL

73

perhaps but never taken by storm, which are quietly discovered one day to be no longer inhabited. The way in which an influential philosopher may undermine the empire of his predecessors consists, one may say, chiefly in his providing his contemporaries with other interests.”31 Other features of idealism have also been questioned. At the end of Christendom, we have come to an era of cultural fragmentation when the reconciliation and progress suggested by Hegel’s philosophy seem remote possibilities. Since Kierkegaard, critics have complained about the totalizing and depersonalizing tendencies of Hegel’s philosophy, which describes and positions each particular in terms of a global system. Individuality is thus expended for the sake of a comprehensive explanatory scheme. Moreover, the attempt to offer a historical study of religion which locates Christianity at a point where all other faiths are regarded as at best anticipatory is now discredited. Historical and social scientific study of religion has its own integrity without subordination to the interests of theology. Islam continues to command the allegiance of millions in a world that remains “furiously religious” (Berger). The projects of Christian theology are more fragmented and occasional. The systematic theologies that are written today do not generally attempt the vast integration of discourses, disciplines, and religions that we find in Hegel. Although philosophy shows positive signs today of a reawakened interest in the resources of the Christian tradition, the grand Hegelian synthesis cannot be repeated at this time. At best, it is viewed as a monumental accomplishment of an earlier, more self-confident era. However, the student of modern theology cannot afford to bypass Hegel’s work. Its conceptuality has entered the bloodstream of Christian thought, particularly in the renaissance of Trinitarian doctrine from Barth onward. The dynamism of the life of God, as opposed to more static accounts of the divine being, is captured by Hegelian terminology with the consequence that even when his metaphysical commitments cannot be shared, elements of his thought continue to be appropriated and discussed. Hegel’s work demands study not only in its own right as the great Christian philosophy of modernity, but also for the suggestiveness of its concepts, themes, and arguments, without which much in contemporary theology cannot be understood. Notes 1 Throughout his Berlin period, Hegel retained his Swabian accent, being described as “a genuine Tübingen Seminarian” at work in the Prussian capital. Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 528. 2 A selection of Hegel’s early theological work is available in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). 3 Peter C. Hodgson, ed., Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 84. 4 Science of Logic, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929).

74

DAVID FERGUSSON

5 For Plotinus, being is expressed through flowing outward and returning to itself. Yet even he did not view the history of the world as philosophically significant in this process. 6 Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§ 178–196. 7 Peter Hodgson, Hegel: Theologian of Spirit (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 8. 8 The term “sublation” is often used as the preferred English translation of the German noun Aufhebung, with the verb “to sublate” rendering aufheben. This expression, drawn from the Latin sublatio, meaning “lifting up,” is not altogether clear to Englishspeaking students of Hegel. Its function is to denote the way in which there is both abolition and fulfillment at every stage of the dialectical process. 9 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:111. 10 For a discussion of Hegel’s aesthetic theory, see Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), 126–175. 11 Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History, 130. 12 Karl Barth characteristically complains that revelation is here a matter of divine necessity. “Hegel, in making the dialectical method of logic the essential nature of God, made impossible the knowledge of the actual dialectic of grace, which has its foundation in the freedom of God.” Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London: SCM, 1972), 420. 13 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 495. 14 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 447. 15 Taylor, Hegel, 498. 16 “This prejudice [i.e., against Judaism] is seen in perspective only if seen together with the prejudice of Hegel’s Christian (and that of the Hegelian philosophy itself), for ancient Greece and all its works.” Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought (London, 1967), 136. Fackenheim also notes that Hegel’s more positive remarks concerning Judaism were often ignored by later German Hegelians. 17 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 246–247. 18 This is discussed by Laurence Dickey, “Hegel on Religion and Philosophy,” in Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 322ff. 19 The Subjective Logic of Hegel, trans. H. Sloman and J. Wallon (London: John Chapman, 1855). 20 John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy: Studies of the History of Idealism in England and America (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931), 168. In what follows, I have drawn from Muirhead’s discussion of “how Hegel came to England.” 21 Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition, 171. 22 For a survey of the movement, see H. D. Lewis, “The British Idealists,” in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, vol. 2, ed. Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Steven T. Katz, and Patrick Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 271–314. The Scottish idealists are usefully discussed and anthologized in David Boucher, ed., The Scottish Idealists: Selected Philosophical Writings (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004).

HEGEL

75

23 Green’s writings are collected in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, ed. R. L. Nettleship (London, 1885–1888). 24 Lewis, “The British Idealists,” 301. 25 For discussion of John Caird, see A. C. Cheyne, Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), 165–184. 26 John Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, vol. 1 (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1899), 153. 27 Caird, The Fundamental Ideas, 155. 28 Ibid., 187. 29 This criticism was argued most cogently by A. S. Pringle-Pattison, who advocated a form of personalist idealism over against absolute idealism. See his Hegelianism and Personality (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1887). 30 Caird, The Fundamental Ideas, 193. 31 G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 10–11. For further discussion of the shift from idealism to realism in British philosophy, see Rudolf Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938).

Bibliography

Important primary sources, available in English translation, for the study of Hegel’s views on religion include the following:

G. W. F. Hegel Hegel, G. W. F. Phenemenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984–1987. For an anthology of Hegel’s theological writings with useful introduction and notes, see the following: Hodgson, Peter C. (ed.). G. W. F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997.

For Further Reading Boucher, David. British Idealism. London: Continuum, 2009. Hodgson, Peter C. Hegel and Christian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Houlgate, Stephen. Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1991. Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

CHAPTER 4

Coleridge Stephen R. Holmes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) has suffered celebrity. A pair of poems and a drug habit have been enough to convince many that they knew all that was worth knowing about him. It has for too long been forgotten that he left pioneering writings in perhaps half a dozen different academic fields, and influenced by his friendship and conversation a fair proportion of those who were to define the cultural life of the Victorian age. He is becoming known again;1 it is to the credit of several pioneers that the theological community rediscovered him rather early on, and so this essay has many distinguished precursors from which to learn.2

Romantic Possibilities We may trace something of the cultural shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism in microcosm in the story of Coleridge’s early years. The French Revolution brought the troublesome fact of evil squarely before the face of an optimistic philosophy: what started as the overthrow of ancient irrationalism by a new polity built on reason degenerated into the Terror; and the proud proclamation of liberty and equality that removed a king resulted only in an emperor. Coleridge, like others, was disillusioned; his hymn to the success of “glad liberty” in “The Destruction of the Bastille” gave way to his plea to Freedom in “France: An Ode”: “forgive me that I cherished / One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes!”3 With political disillusionment, however, came also philosophical dissatisfaction. Coleridge was learning, like the other early Romantics, to feel the strength and mystery of life, nature, and even art, and so the Enlightened attempt to explain such things as deterministic mechanisms composed of levers and pulleys began to appear not just wrong but also deeply unpleasant.4 Such intuitions inspired the new artistic forms that are the glories of Romanticism, but they bring with them philosophical difficulties. Coleridge saw

COLERIDGE

77

these latent problems more clearly than many and sought to address them. The world was being understood in mechanistic terms, and empirical data seemed to support this mechanical understanding; gloriously in the case of the advances being made in the sciences, but less so in the social and political spheres in France. If space were to be found for human freedom and life, with all the rich resonance the Romantics wanted that word to carry, a breach would have to be made in this imposing, if now unsatisfying, philosophical edifice. Coleridge’s attempts to make that breach are bound up with his advocacy of, and borrowings from, the new German philosophy with which his name became linked for a time in England.5 The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant had removed the possibility of extrapolating from sense-data to noumenal reality, by consigning all sensedata to the phenomenal sphere. Clearly, if this could be upheld, and a satisfying way of insisting on the possibilities of speaking truthfully about noumenal reality on other grounds be found, the problem was solved. Mechanics might describe the way the world appears, but Romantic intuitions grasp how it really is. Kant’s own attempt to construct a positive metaphysics, to speak with content about the noumenal, was centered on what he termed the “practical reason” – reason operating in the moral realm. This concept was borrowed and transformed by Coleridge, whose most basic epistemological distinction is that between reason and understanding. At one point, he writes in a letter, “My philosophy (as metaphysics) is built on the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding. He who, after fairly attending to my exposition of the point … can still find no meaning in this distinction … for him the perusal of my philosophical writings, at least, will be a mere waste of time.”6 This assertion has been regularly quoted, but its meaning has been too often missed. Coleridge here links his metaphysical program with an epistemological distinction; indeed, he insists that the former is “built” on the latter. In examining Coleridge’s thought we may identify metaphysics with theology, at least approximately, and so, taking Coleridge at his word, assume that we will only be able to comprehend his theological scheme if we first understand his account of epistemology. Understanding, then, is “a Faculty judging according to sense,”7 which is to say the human mind operating in the phenomenal realm. Some animals have the faculty of understanding, according to Coleridge.8 Understanding may be analyzed into three parts: appropriation of attention, abstraction, and generalization.9 Just so, the understanding can only ever be concerned with symbols – words, names, and images – and never with the thing in itself. It deals with empirical data, and so all natural science lies within its sphere, as the subject entirely built on empirical data. To attempt to apply the understanding to a metaphysical or theological question is simply to make a category mistake. This was Coleridge’s dismissive answer to any supposed “Evidences for Christianity.”10 To deal with the Ding an sich we need to apply a different mental faculty, that of reason. Reason is, for Coleridge, the faculty of moral and noumenal judgment which comprehends those things that are universal and necessary; its object

78

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

may be exemplified by mathematical truth.11 He borrows a definition from Jacobi, to the effect that “Reason bears the same relationship to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal and the Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena.”12 Truths of the reason carry an implicit “ought,” so that in being believed, they demand to be obeyed. Thus far he has not gone beyond the German transcendental tradition. Coleridge offers an at-first-sight-obscure reflection on how those things that are proper objects of the reason appear to the understanding in the Aids to Reflection.13 First, the thing will be “inconceivable,” as conception is the work of the understanding; and, second, it will only appear as two contradictory conceptions when judged by the understanding. No doubt there are echoes of Kant’s antinomies here, but why should Coleridge insist on such an unlikely point? It seems that he needs this point to make reason do more than Kant ever could. Only by this move can Coleridge assert what he wants to, that reason may penetrate the noumenal barrier and know things as they are, not merely as they appear to be to the understanding. Importantly, Coleridge insists on an addition to Jacobi’s definition (quoted above): “it must be added, that [reason] is an organ identical with its appropriate objects.” This might sound merely comical until Coleridge substitutes “Logos” for “reason.” Coleridge used this word in full awareness of its various nuances,14 and sought to gather up all the richness of the concept in his own usage. The Logos is the primal idea in the mind of God, as the Stoics taught;15 it is the rational principle of the universe, the nous of the Pythagoreans;16 it is the mediating principle between God and his creation, as taught by Philo;17 it is God the Son, who was incarnate in Jesus Christ. The reason is at once the presence of God in each human person, and the ultimate ground of reality. The idea of the moral force of reason, borrowed from Kant, now has a new complexion: if the reason is indeed the presence of God in the person by the Logos, then any dictate of the reason is bound to be framed in the imperative. Coleridge regularly describes conversion in just these terms, the aligning of the will with the reason, the Logos.18 Further, it is clearly inappropriate to talk of “human reason”; Reason is one, the Logos.19 Each of us is already joined to the divine Logos, and so our assent to revelation, to the truths of metaphysics, is not properly described as either subjective or objective. Rather, we discover that within us is already a connectedness to ultimate (noumenal) reality. The purpose behind Coleridge’s insistence on the contradictory nature of truths of reason when viewed by the understanding should now be clear. Kant uses the faculty of reason to preserve space for human freedom in the face of a mechanistic philosophy, but he does this by (effectively) denying the possibility of metaphysics: the poverty of the Critique of Practical Reason and (particularly) the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is notorious. Coleridge desires to be far more positive about the possibilities for metaphysical knowledge than Kant, but in so doing opens himself to the possibility of weakening or destroying the foundations of the epistemology he is borrowing: his positive metaphysical proposals

COLERIDGE

79

are apparently in danger of undermining the negative phenomenal judgment on empiricism that he has borrowed. However, having asserted that truths of reason are simply inconceivable to the understanding, he can retain Kant’s negative point (that empiricism is insufficient evidence for the metaphysical claims made by mechanistic philosophy) whilst asserting, on the basis of a doctrine of the indwelling Logos, much more positive metaphysics than Kant felt able to.20 Like Schleiermacher, Coleridge saw that within the new worlds opened up by Romanticism there were possibilities for a revival of Christian piety.

The Vocation of the Poet This analysis did not, of course, come instantaneously to the young Romantic Coleridge, and it seems that he was content for some time to accept the tensions and celebrate the new life that he saw all around – as may be seen in the Conversation Poems, and during his early friendship with William Wordsworth. From such a position, pantheism was an obviously attractive theological step, and Coleridge and Wordsworth would discuss Spinoza together often whilst working on Lyrical Ballads.21 Pantheism was, however, fundamentally unsatisfactory for Coleridge, as it removed any possibility of personality in God, or of human freedom. Here, perhaps, is Coleridge’s most pressing question in his life as a young poet: he wished to ascribe both personality and will to both God and humanity. Again, and perhaps better, he came to believe God to be personal and volitional, knew the same to be true of humanity, and sought ways to understand these things. This may be done in a trivial way by separating God from His creation, but Coleridge was a Romantic. If he could not be a pantheist, he must at least preserve a strong doctrine of immanence, and therein lies the problem, which he famously described, “of admitting a one Ground of the Universe (which however must be admitted) and yet finding room for anything else.”22 Or there, at least, lies the intellectual problem. To understand why finding an adequate theology haunted Coleridge the way it did, we need to glance at his understanding of what it means to be a poet.23 In 1796, whilst discussing “The Destiny of Nations,” Coleridge announces, For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken The substance from its shadow….24

Here, the young Coleridge affirms with great optimism our ability to interpret the world of nature in order to speak of ultimate realities – in order, that is, to do

80

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

theology. Two features of this passage are important: the allusion to Plato’s cave, and the appearance, even this early, of the concept of the “symbolical” which was to become a further part of Coleridge’s sophisticated analysis of epistemology. In an important discussion in The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge describes the imagination as that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors.25

The imagination, then, produces symbols, which are expressions of reason in language appropriate to the understanding (“sense” here indicates the apprehension of the phenomenal world which provides the raw materials on which the understanding does its work).26 The poet’s role – and that of any artist, we may surmise – is to use this power to interpret reality to others, to reveal the presence of the Logos in the world. The poet is to act as prophet, to speak God’s truth to the people.27 The idea recurs throughout Coleridge’s early poetry; of particular interest is a passage from Frost at Midnight, which Harding describes as the “apotheosis” of the theme:28 But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: So shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.29

What is interesting here is that Coleridge looks to his son, Hartley, to read the “eternal language” in a way that he cannot (as has been made clear earlier in the poem). For the first time, the question of hermeneutics raises itself – the poet may interpret nature, but who will give authority to his interpretation? The Romantics’ models as poet-prophets, the Hebrew writing prophets and John Milton, were confirmed in their role by long acceptance, but who was to give this confirmation to the Romantics themselves?30 Coleridge here looks to Hartley; in Tintern Abbey Wordsworth looks to Dorothy to play the same role.31 Soon, in his daemonic poems, Coleridge is doubting the very possibility of the role. In Christabel, Geraldine exists as a source of inspiration, certainly, but there is a basic ambiguity running through much of the poem as to whether she inspires beatific vision or the most fundamental evil; even at the end whilst the reader is

COLERIDGE

81

encouraged to share Christabel’s perception of her friend, her father’s blindness, or doubt, raises acutely the issue of who perceives truly and who is deceived. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, this theme is deployed much more centrally: the Mariner’s tale constantly asks its hearers to question how much is real and how much is fantasy; not to doubt the Mariner’s integrity, but to doubt that his own understanding of his experiences in any way corresponds to truth. The last of the daemonic poems, Kubla Khan, shows this need for a hermeneut most powerfully, as Coleridge remembers “[a] damsel with a dulcimer” whose “symphony and song” would, if remembered, enable him to “build that dome in air” so that “all who pass would see.” Coleridge has lost his hermeneut, but remembers the feeling of having known one.32 After this, he was for some years to produce little significant poetry.33 The only major work is Dejection, which laments his loss of the ability to write. His devotion to metaphysical study was at its strongest around the time when he was writing Dejection: Coleridge remembered what it was to have been a prophet, and a satisfactory metaphysics was the hermeneutical key that would enable him to prophesy again. This, more than any intellectual challenge about “finding room,” was the real problem, for Coleridge at least. I have pre-empted the history at several points, presenting accounts of how his engagement with, and adjustments to, current philosophy led him to construct an epistemology that sought to answer these questions. The issue that underlies the existential challenge at least is one of trust. All the epistemological connectedness that Coleridge sought to discover in his philosophical explorations still comes up against the question of the daemonic poems, which is just the question of Descartes’ own demon: how can we know that what we experience as access to reality is trustworthy and not deceptive? Finally, then, the intellectual and existential challenges coalesce into the same problem, which, as Colin Gunton has ably explored,34 is the ancient one of the one and the many. Coleridge must affirm the glorious diversity of creation, and particularly the discrete existence of human persons; but having done this, there must also be some form of unity to the world, a connectedness, if our knowledge of the world is to be trustworthy. Says Coleridge, The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according to Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (i.e., the existence of which is inconceivable except under the condition of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditioned and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system.35

The aggregate must be reduced to a system; the world must be both many and one. Coleridge found a way of describing human connectedness to reality in epistemological analysis; he found reason to trust that this connectedness was not illusory in a doctrine of God. This doctrine is the source of the uniting of epistemology and theology that we observed toward the beginning of this chapter, and this is what we must next analyze more carefully.

82

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

Visions of God We have already noted that in his concept of the Logos, Coleridge is postulating some sort of distinction in God – deus idem et alter, to borrow a favorite phrase of his. Here, in the idea of “alterity,” distinction in unity, Coleridge found a paradigmatic case of how the one and the many did not need to be opposed, but could be held together. Earlier I did no more than list the jumble of ideas that feed into this concept: it is now time to outline Coleridge’s analysis of the doctrine of the Trinity. The heart of Coleridge’s (mature) doctrine of God is the eternal self-actualization of primordial Will. Coleridge regards it as a truth available to philosophy that “Will” is more basic than any other term we might reach for,36 and so begins speaking of God in terms of “absolute Will.” He combines this with a description of God borrowed from the Medievals, actus purissimus sine ulla potentia: all that God can possibly do, God does. Hence this absolute Will does not remain merely potent, but wills to be, becomes real, and this eternal act of self-realization is the Trinity. The first move in this self-realization is the existence of the Supreme Mind, but Mind cannot remain merely potent any more than the Will could, and so must also be active. The Supreme Mind thinks of itself – it is the only worthy object of its own thought – and so Mind begets the Supreme Idea, the Logos. The eternal self-realization of God demands, however, that God remain one, and so there is a third term, the unity which Mind and Idea, Father and Son, share, and that is the Spirit.37 Describing Coleridge’s account like this could lead to a misunderstanding, and so it must be made clear that this act of self-realization is eternal. God is not one before he is Triune, is not Will before he is Father, Son, and Spirit. God’s basic decision, the full content of God’s own life, is eternally to be himself and another in the unity of a third. The Father’s eternal begetting of the Son and spiriting of the Spirit is God’s life, God’s actus. To speak of primordial Will is a way of describing this, not a postulation of a reality behind the Trinity. This observation is important inasmuch as Coleridge regularly uses his four-membered tetrarchies38 as a logical scheme to describe God, and some of his commentators have queried his genuine commitment to Trinitarianism as a result.39 So Coleridge is not seeking to assert that God is one before He is triune. In speaking of the primacy of will, Coleridge is, however, making a claim concerning the unity of the Trinity. To assert that Father, Son, and Spirit are homoousios is, according to Coleridge, to assert that the Three Persons are united in willing their own life.40 In describing the Trinity in these terms, Coleridge is following a broadly Augustinian tradition: the psychological analysis is not borrowed from the master, but certainly stands in broad continuity with Augustine’s approach in the later books of De Trinitate, and to identify God primarily with will rather than intellect, is to side with the medieval Augustinians over the Dominican Thomist tradition. Coleridge is also firmly

COLERIDGE

83

within the Christian tradition in linking divine unity with a single act of willing.41 The account is speculative, but speculative theology has a long and at times noble history within Christian theology, particularly in those parts of the tradition most influenced by Platonism. In any case, whilst Coleridge insists on at least two occasions that the Trinity is indeed a necessary speculative idea, he also insists that Christian revelation demands that we believe this.42 Mention of speculative theology leads to a different criticism, however, which must be addressed: where, in this account, does the Gospel narrative feature? Coleridge’s suggestion, made more than once, that Plato knew and understood God’s triune being43 points to a decisive detachment of God’s internal life from the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a problem: the doctrine of the Trinity, we must insist, represents the defeat of Greek philosophy, and not its consummation – although we so insist only whilst always recognizing that the doctrine’s particular formulation owes much to the philosophical tradition.44 Coleridge, in a tradition of Christian Platonism that stretches back to Origen, finds adequate resources for the doctrine of the Trinity in the general concept of God, without any need to have heard the name of Jesus. Let us immediately acknowledge that, thus formulated, this criticism is too harsh; Coleridge is (like Origen, and Henry More, and the rest of the tradition) using the philosophy to serve the faith.45 By the end of this exposition, however, it will be a version of this criticism that is decisive. To make the point, we might briefly compare Coleridge’s account to Barth’s doctrine of God in volume 2 of the Church Dogmatics.46 There, too, the realization of will (“decision” is Barth’s term) is central. For Barth, however, God’s decision is first election, which is to say his decision is first to be the Jewish man Jesus Christ. The logic may then follow Scripture: the doctrine of the Trinity is no more than what must be said about God if the chief actor of the Gospel narratives is who he is claimed to be – if Jesus Christ is Lord.47 This matters, finally, because it establishes those things that Platonisms, however Christian, cannot establish: materiality, particularity, historicity – for Coleridge, no less than for Origen, these were problems, and so we hunt in vain for any serious Christology amongst the Logosophia.48 Indeed, Coleridge clearly felt the need to defend the possibility that the perfect unity that is God’s own life may give rise to that which is particular and evil without willing either evil or particularities. This defense is constructed in terms of the divine ideas. I will trace the most sustained exposition of this, in the Opus Maximum manuscript,49 in some detail because it is so revealing of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Coleridge’s appropriation of the Christian Platonist tradition. Under a chapter title, “On the Divine Ideas,” Coleridge begins by stressing the sharpness of the problem: philosophy can only deal with ideas, which are reached “by abstracting from time.” So the reality of history and matter is problematic, and must be argued for: “The passage from the absolute to the separated finite, this is the difficulty which who shall overcome? This is the chasm which ages have tried in vain to overbridge.”50 Lest anyone think that this is metaphysical irrelevance, Coleridge

84

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

states that this must be done to find “standing room.” Once again, it is the free personal existence of human beings that is at stake. So, the traditional Christian Platonic construction begins: the Logos is the Idea idearum,51 not just the Father’s eternal adequate idea of himself, but that in which every other idea in the divine mind is contained. If there are such distinct ideas, then, precisely because God is idem et alter in the unity of the Spirit, they can and must be really distinct without ever being separated. This, however, raises the question of the ontological status of these ideas: eternal self-actualizing Will is indeed sine ulla potentia, and so whatever is willed is actual, and whatever is not willed is not even potential. The ideas thus apparently must be eternally actual; Coleridge will not balk at such terms as “uncreated forms” or “eternal truths, powers & intelligences.”52 Whence, then, derives the possibility of change, and so of a temporal history? “[T]he Ideas are necessarily immutable, in as much as they are one with the Eternal Act, by which the absolute Will self-realised begets its Idea as the other self.”53 At this point, however, Coleridge thinks there is a problem in his logic: these ideas can only be real in God, yet God is simple, and so no particular can be real within him. The solution, suggests Coleridge, is that the ideas, whose essence is again will, each will to be only in the being of God. This solves more than the immediate logical problem, however, since it raises the specter – the potential – for an idea not to so will, but to will its own particular existence to be elevated above the universal.54 The idea which so wills would be a “god-less self, this false and contradictory self, a lie from the beginning and the father or fountain of all lies,”55 but the potential so to be now exists within the account Coleridge is giving, and with it the possibility for both particularity and change. This potential and possibility needs further explication, however. Only God is, and so willing not to be in God is very simply willing not to be. The potential raised is indeed spectral. We see this in our own failures, suggests Coleridge, as we observe the fundamentally contradictory and self-destructive nature of evil actions. This is perhaps the point to note that Coleridge was very serious about human depravity, and indeed, rather dismissive of those who were not.56 His own experiences, perhaps, of failing as a husband, of losing a friend in Wordsworth, and of becoming addicted to opium, which all came together in his personal crisis of 1813, made him rather impatient with the naïve liberalism which, then as now, found traditional Christian teaching on original sin to be pessimistic and oppressive. Coleridge knew, after all, that even Kant recognized the radical evil in human beings and took it seriously.57 Back to the exposition: ideas only exist actually insofar as they will themselves to have no actuality other than in God, who is universal and utter actuality. There is, however, the possibility of a change. Coleridge regards these two statements as epistemologically distinct: the first describes eternal and universal actuality, and so is a truth of the reason, and so the only direct evidence for it can be the very idea itself; the second is a question of history and so empirical. As such it is in the realm of the understanding, and so only the fact of the fall from perfection can

COLERIDGE

85

establish its possibility. If it is observable that evil exists, then there has indeed been a fall from perfection and so such a fall was possible.58 Coleridge believes that it is demonstrable both that evil exists and that it is not eternal; both Manichaeism (used as a cipher for any dualism asserting the equal eternal existence of good and evil) and fatalisms that assert there is no evil, only blind chance, can be demonstrated to be inadequate.59 Evil has come into being, but not by God’s will: rather, it is “in the strictest sense of the words, selforiginated, self-originant.”60 Thus we may conclude that it is indeed the case that some of the eternal ideas willed to be other than eternally one with God, and so the possibility of change and corruption became actual.61 A second manuscript chapter of this work is a comparison of what has gone before with the system of Plotinus, seeking to show that Coleridge’s own views are decisively different,62 which they are, although hinting (as I have noted above) that Plato had grasped the doctrine of the Trinity in all important points.63 I have spent so much time on this one chapter because it is not well known, and it is arguably as powerful an attempt to derive a broadly Origenistic theology as has been written in the English language. To what extent is this an adequate solution to the problem of the one and the many? The unity of the world is hardly in danger here; that is established by the unity of God. Coleridge tries hard also to establish the particularity of the world. The ideas which make up the world’s particularity are real and distinct, so much so that Coleridge reaches for language that has often been considered dangerous within the Christian tradition to describe them: “eternal,” “uncreated,” and the (admittedly Scriptural) assertion that “ye shall be as gods.” The extent to which there is a genuine particularity established here may appear more doubtful, however: the will to be particular is the will to not be, and the source of all evil. The question raised is the nature of created particularity: what Coleridge denies is our ability to be isolated individuals, where an “individual” is defined as the self that remains when separated from God and other people. That self is, as Coleridge’s arguments demand, precisely nothing: any sort of orthodox Christian account of the doctrines of creation and providence will assert the same, even if the relational ontologies that have become popular in the last few decades are not accepted. The particularity that remains possible under this scheme is to have distinct being within the loving embrace of God, to find self precisely in surrendering self to him. The Christian Platonist tradition is often criticized for not taking particularity seriously enough, but, in Coleridge’s hands at least, this understanding of God leads rather straightforwardly to an account of human particularity that carries the sorts of nuances that any properly Christian theology would demand.64 We must, however, criticize Coleridge’s account here on a different score: particularity is established, but whence materiality? This is perhaps a dangerous question: Coleridge did not write the remaining chapters of the work, and so we have to guess to a certain extent where the argument is going. A comparison with Origen at this point is very tempting, however: a very similar

86

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

vision of a heavenly fall is present, as a result of which materiality and historicity would enter the world as unfortunate remedial necessities. This impression is strengthened by things Coleridge did write elsewhere: “Christianity is especially differenced from all other religions,” we are told in the first appendix to the Statesman’s Manual,65 “by being grounded on facts which all men alike have the means of ascertaining.” Coleridge is referring to a felt need for salvation, and so his point is not as bizarre as it may seem out of context, but still, is it really the case that the particular histories of Jesus Christ, of Israel before him, and of the apostolic mission after him, are not at least a part of what Christianity is “grounded on”? Coleridge’s disdain for the Unitarian celebration of the historical and the particular66 – of those things accessible to the understanding – has gone too far here. Again, very early in Coleridge’s account of Christian spirituality in the Aids to Reflection, there is an almost wholly negative evaluation of the physical world. “[O]ur outward circumstances” are “cast and moulded” in “the form of the World, which is evermore at variance with the Divine Form (or idea).” Just so, in our work of “forming anew the Divine Image in the soul,” we are generally to “suppose the World at enmity with our design.”67 A few pages later we are told that we are to aspire finally to “spiritual” acts which “have an especial reference to the Timeless, the Permanent, the Eternal.”68 The Christian is, it seems, to escape this time-bound material existence, and find his way back to the eternal ideas which eternally adore God; “to,” in Coleridge’s language, “lose and leave behind his dividual [sic] phantom Self in order to find his true Self in that distinctness, where no division can be – in the eternal I AM, the ever-living WORD, of which all the Elect … are but the fainter and fainter Echoes!”69 Coleridge knows that the Gospel history is central, of course, and he will even assert it from time to time. Later in the Aids he describes “the Gospel” as “a History, a series of Facts and Events related or announced. These … at the same time are, most important doctrinal Truths; but still Facts.”70 In the Confessions, again, Coleridge discusses bodily resurrection, and so identifies Christianity with the “mid-point, in which the Historical & Spiritual meet.” So it must have a history, composed in part of phenomena of nature and in part of the miraculous – “phænomena in Nature that are beyond Nature.”71 The Incarnation is similarly the union of opposites: “Eternity in the form of Time … = the absolute to the conditional, or the Real to the Apparent.”72 As such, the Incarnation provides the possibility for God to take seriously the imperfect material and temporal realm: God can only love this world “as it is contained in” Christ.73 This is hard-won, however. The uncomplicated celebration of creation at the beginning of Scripture – or in the Lyrical Ballads – is not what we see here. The allusion to Plato’s cave, made in “The Destiny of Nations,” before he ever met Wordsworth, is a far better indication of his attitudes than the linkage of their two names in discussions of the early Romantic movement. At the end of his life, Coleridge was still looking beyond the world to the realm of the Ideas, and finding it a struggle to link this world to that one in Christ.

COLERIDGE

87

Theology and Social Comment All of this may seem a strange thing to say of one who was involved in politics, that most this-worldly of pursuits, all his life. Nonetheless, when we turn to this area of his thought, these metaphysical speculations will prove illuminating. The crowning text, after all, may have been occasioned by the Catholic Emancipation question, but it was announced as being On the Constitution of Church and State, According to the Idea of Each.74 Ideas present themselves to the understanding in two contradictory modes, but reason holds these together and grasps their essential unity, which is to say that every idea mirrors the alterity that is God. The ideal nation, then, can only be understood by holding together the State and the National Church. The idea of the state is also polar: “the two antagonist powers or opposite interests of the state … PERMANENCE and … PROGRESSION.”75 Permanence is vested in the land-owning classes, the “Barons”; progression is achieved by the merchants, manufacturers, and professions, or the “Franklins.” There is thus something fundamentally right about a parliament of two houses, the Lords and Commons. The National Church is a third estate alongside these two, “the necessary antecedent condition” of them both. It is not necessarily Christian, although it is a boon if the clerks of the national church are ministers of the Gospel as well. Rather, it is the portion of the population who uphold, develop, and pass on the culture and civilization of the nation. Coleridge calls this class the “Clerisy.” Those who labor in the universities, who produce and preserve the artistic heritage of the nation, who practice medicine – all are part of the clerisy, as are the schoolteacher and the pastor in every parish, whose job is to spread the most useful parts of the nation’s culture to all its people. Theology, as the science which deals with morality and reality (in the ideas), is necessarily the head of this culture, the mistressscience, but much else is comprehended besides. Within this conception of the nation, the monarch has a series of particular functions. Within the state, she or he is to be the fulcrum on which the balance between the barons and franklins turns – the mesothesis between the thesis of permanence and the antithesis of progression, to apply Coleridge’s noetic pentad once more.76 Again, the monarch is to be head of the national church, as the nation’s culture is concentrated and visible in him or her. This dual role is summed up in a conception only hinted at in Church and State, but made explicit in Coleridge’s Notebooks: the monarch is the symbol of the nation, the visible particular in whom the eternal idea of the nation may be perceived and understood.77 As such, the “royal we” expresses a simple truth: in the king’s majesty, the unity of the nation is present.78 This vision of the nation as an idea enables Coleridge to cut through much that is complicating in political theories; in his discussion of the “social contract,” for example, he is able to acknowledge that no such contract has ever been made

88

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

in history, and that even if it had, there would be problems enforcing it as the sole basis for the state. If, instead, we consider it to be a part of an eternally existent idea, the Nation, to which we all have some access, then the problem is much simpler: “no man, who has ever listened to laborers … in any alehouse … discussing the injustice of the present rate of wages … will doubt for a moment that they are fully possessed by the idea.”79 Coleridge’s work on Church and State seemingly had little impact on the immediate debate about Catholic emancipation; it was, however, one of his more influential works, lauded by William Gladstone and F. D. Maurice in the next generation, and still by William Temple and T. S. Eliot in the next century. In this brief sketch I have tried to show that even in considering pressing political ephemera, Coleridge’s thoughts were almost wholly shaped by his theological and philosophical commitments. It may be that his abiding interest in social issues, and the sense that there must be a connection between politics and religion, were what kept Coleridge’s denigration of the world of temporal particulars from becoming too damaging: he would not separate his metaphysical speculations from the life that was around.

The Statesman’s Manual Perhaps this should be no surprise; before Coleridge had even met Wordsworth, he had lectured on “Politics and Religion,”80 and in 1816 he had published his first Lay Sermon, The Statesman’s Manual, or: The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight.81 His mature views on the Bible, contained in the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,82 are of interest, as he both is one of the earliest mediators of German higher criticism to Anglophone society, and offers a carefully constructed defense of the religious authority of the Bible in the face of it. Very simply, Coleridge will not believe that every word of the Scriptures was “dictated by an Infallible Intelligence; that the writers, each and all, were divinely informed as well as inspired.” That there is great wisdom and inspiration in Scripture, he will allow; that those parts in which the writer records words that are specifically claimed to be spoken by God, prophecy, and the like are genuinely dictated, he will also accept; but that the whole has a similar origin he cannot. Some of his most persuasive prose is to be found in this short work: [L]et me once be persuaded that all these heart-awakening Utterances of human hearts – Men of like faculties and passions with my own, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing, are but as a “Comedia Divina” of a superhuman – O bear with me, if I say – Ventriloquist – that the Royal Harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as a “many-stringed Instrument” for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-andblood of our common Humanity, responds to the Touch, – that this sweet Psalmist of Israel was himself as mere an instrument as his Harp, an automaton Poet, Mourner, & Supplicant – all is gone! all sympathy, at least, all example!83

COLERIDGE

89

Persuasive prose is not the issue, however. Coleridge knew the work of Reimarus, Lessing, and Schleiermacher; he foresaw the gathering storm that finally broke with the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, and was foreshadowed by George Eliot’s translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus in 1846. Probably he did not guess just how skeptical Biblical criticism would become, but he saw that a naïve Protestantism, believing the Bible to be the Word of God and believing all else “because the Bible tells me so,” was not going to be an adequate defense. Moreover, he had an alternative account of the location of religious authority already in place in his concept of Reason. When, in the first of the letters that make up the Confessions, Coleridge asserted the possibility of finding “a discrepance” between the Scriptures and the Logos, who is the Truth, he did so because he believed that Reason provided him with access to the Logos: not as sure access as was offered by the Scriptures (“the dim and reflected light of the moon beside the sun”), but genuinely independent access nonetheless. Coleridge had less to fear from the results of the higher critics than almost any British theologian of his day; in a sense, the aim of the Confessions is to undermine a false faith so that true faith will not be shaken by criticism. Coleridge draws a sharp distinction between inspiration, an effect of the Holy Spirit, assisting natural capacities, which all Christians experience to some degree, but which was experienced pre-eminently by the biblical authors, and revelation, an act of the Divine Word, which involves the communication of new truth to the recipient. This distinction clearly relies once again on some measure of “natural” access to eternal truth: no amount of inspiration, thus defined, will produce writings of the character that Coleridge ascribes to the Scriptures unless this is the case. This access once allowed, however, Coleridge may construct a doctrine of Scripture that places the Bible at the center of Christian faith and theology without needing to defend it against the coming critical challenges.

“A Poet, or That Which Once Seem’d He” In a note written on the fly-leaf of one of his own copies of The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge complained about his critical reception: his work was “a motley Patch-work, or Farrago of heterogeneous Effusions”; he was “the wild eccentric Genius that has published nothing but fragments & splendid Tirades.”84 The criticisms are, I suppose, understandable: Coleridge’s prose can meander alarmingly from subject to subject, and he is constantly hinting at hidden depths, to be revealed in works “in the press” that never appeared. One suspects that the Opus Maximum, which had been promising to make sense of all his work throughout his adult life, would still be unfinished however long he had lived; one feels a pang of sympathy for those disciples who lost patience with him. His influence, however, is undeniable – so much so that it is becoming fashionable to make the comparison with Hegel. F. D. Maurice was happy to acknowledge him; John Henry Newman was not, but borrowed and learned from Coleridge

90

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

nonetheless. John Stuart Mill and William Gladstone ensured that his ideas did, eventually, affect the political and economic life of the nation, and F. J. A. Hort’s attempt to find a way of coping with biblical criticism within a recognizably orthodox Christianity sits very comfortably alongside his respect for Coleridge. In America, the Transcendentalists and particularly Horace Bushnell owed much to his work. Further away from the mainstream, the supernaturalism of Edward Irving’s “Catholic Apostolic Church” doubtless owed something to Coleridge, as did Harriet Martineau’s political philosophy. The list could go on. Coleridge cannot, however, properly be compared to Hegel: “Hegelians” and “Hegelianism” were common in the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth; “Coleridgeanism” has never, to my knowledge, been coined (for which all who care about the beauty of language may be grateful!), and J. H. Green, the first Professor of Surgery at King’s College London, may have the distinction of being the world’s one and only “Coleridgean.” The intellectual might of a Kierkegaard could not break the influence of Hegel; the cheap and shabby jibes of a Hazlitt were more than enough to turn a nation against Coleridge. Coleridge left many ideas, many distinctions, many hints that were valued; Hegel, by contrast, left an entire way of thinking. Despite his protestations, then, were Coleridge’s critics right to dismiss his corpus as “a motley Patch-work”? I have tried to show that they were not, that all the various strands of Coleridge’s thought were driven by a Christian Platonic system that bears comparison with the thought of Origen. However, the theology that is at the center of it all was never published. The Opus Maximum would have done what was promised, had it ever appeared, but in its absence the connectedness of all Coleridge’s fine ideas and sharp distinctions is at least obscure. He simply never explained, in print at least, how all the fragments fitted together – never showed us that the patchwork was in fact a mosaic, if only we looked hard enough.85 I have tried to reconstruct the picture, and to show how at least some of the fragments fit. I have indicated what I perceive to be the flaws of Coleridge’s Christian Platonism on the way; history, materiality, the Gospel narrative – these things are not taken seriously enough. There is much to celebrate here, however: Coleridge sought to show that God’s eternal beholding of himself in his only begotten Son should make a difference – to the way we read the Scriptures, to the burning political issues of that day and this, and, first and finally, to the possibility of writing poetry. Notes 1 Not least because of the influence of an ongoing critical edition of his works: Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75, jointly published by Routledge & Kegan Paul (London) and Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.); all sixteen volumes have now appeared, including various part volumes. Where possible, I will reference this edition using CCW as an abbreviation.

COLERIDGE

2

3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

91

Other primary works referenced are E. L. Griggs, ed., The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957–1971) (here CL); and Kathleen Coburn, ed., Notebooks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957–) (here CN). The four volumes of extracts and introduction in John Beer, ed., Coleridge’s Writings (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), are a helpful introduction to the confused mass of the corpus. Significant studies include John H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930); James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); J. Robert Barth, S.J., Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987); Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1972); David Pym, The Religious Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979); Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); and Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Lucy Newlin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), maintains the generally exceptionally high standard of that series. Claude Welch’s chapter on Coleridge in vol. 2 of Ninian Smart et al., eds., Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–28, is a remarkably capable summary of Coleridge’s theological thought in a brief compass. Finally, Richard Holmes’s two-volume biography of Coleridge is indispensable reading: Coleridge: Early Visions and Darker Reflections (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989; Harper Collins, 1998). Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) (hereafter PW), 10–11 for “The Destruction” and 243–247 for “France.” The lines quoted from the latter are ll.70–71. See, for instance, comments in “The Science and System of Logic” of 1822 (CCW 11.II, 1019–1027; see especially 1019). It is now generally agreed that Coleridge’s assertions that he formulated his ideas from English sources independently of Kant are to be accepted. This vision of the work of the reason may certainly be found in the Cambridge Platonists; see Claud Howard, Coleridge’s Idealism: A Study of Its Relationship to Kant and to the Cambridge Platonists (Boston: Gorham. 1924); and more recently Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion. His articulation of these ideas, however, is clearly and decisively influenced by his readings of the German transcendental tradition, and so this linkage is not unfair. From the letter of 24/11/1819 to Joseph Hughes, CL VI 1048–1050; it is also reproduced in CCW 4.II, 503–504. CCW 9, 232. See this whole section of the Aids to Reflection on the distinction between reason and understanding; and see also Essay V of “The Landing Place” in The Friend (CCW 4.I, 154–161) and Appendix C of The Statesman’s Manual (CCW 6, 59–93). CCW 4.I, 154–155. CCW 9, 225. See, for example, in the Logic (CCW 13, 207). So, for instance, the examples in the essay in The Friend. CCW 4.I, 155–156.

92

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

13 CCW 9, 233. 14 See Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy; and John Beer’s “Editor’s Excursus Note 4,” in CCW 9, 553–554. 15 See Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 72, 79, 145, for examples. 16 In a lecture of 1819, Coleridge explicitly linked “the intelligential powers” called the nous by “the Pythagoreans and Anaxagoras” with “the Logos of Philo and St John” – and indeed, the “unwritten dogmata of Plato” hinted at in a fragment of Speusippus preserved by Stobaeus. See Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Pilot Press, 1949), 175. 17 See, for example, the comments on Philo in Appendix D of The Statesman’s Manual (CCW 6, 95). 18 For example, see CCW 12.III, 723. 19 CCW 9, 218. 20 So, for instance, when discussing the “Divine ideas” toward the end of his life, he will say that any attempt to “particularize on such a subject involves its own confutation: for it is the application of the understanding … to truths of which the reason exclusively is both the substance beheld & the eye beholding” (Opus Maximum manuscript chapters, “On the Divine Ideas”). 21 See, famously, Coleridge’s own humorous account of the period in the Biographia (CCW 7.I, 193–194). 22 Letter of April 1818; see Letters IV.849–852. 23 In considering this theme, I am following Anthony Harding’s discussion of Coleridge’s early poetry in Coleridge and the Inspired Word (Kingston: McGill-Queens, 1985), 40–45, fairly closely, although I diverge from his conclusions to some extent. My disagreements are indicated in footnotes. 24 PW 131–148, ll.18–23. Harding’s comment on this passage is not quite right: it is not so much that “Nature herself can teach us to raise our eyes to ‘bright Reality’ ” (41) as that Nature, rightly interpreted, is a communication from Reality. 25 CCW 6, 29. See also the note there, where the works of the imagination are described as poieseis, a Greek word carrying the dual sense of “a forming or making” and “a poem.” 26 The definition of imagination in chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria (CCW 7.I, 304) asserts much the same thing. It is interesting to trace how the “ten theses” of the previous chapter, too often written of as no more than plagiarism from Schelling, are in fact a fairly careful re-working (particularly through the footnotes) of the stolen material to provide an introduction to this definition. Even when most guilty of plagiarism, Coleridge was still genuinely original! 27 To complete Coleridge’s epistemological analysis, we must add “fancy” to reason, imagination, understanding, and sense. The fancy associates phenomenal perceptions – sense-data – in patterned ways; not analyzing, as even the understanding does, but merely observing associations. See CCW 7.I, 305. 28 Harding, Coleridge, 43. 29 PW 240–242, ll.54–62. 30 I again owe this penetrating analysis of the issue to Harding, Coleridge, 30–31. 31 So Harding Coleridge, 43, presumably referring to ll, 113–126. 32 Once again, in this paragraph and the previous one I am doing little more than summarizing Harding’s discussion of the daemonic poems, which has colored my

COLERIDGE

33

34 35 36

37 38

39 40

41

93

readings of Coleridge’s poetry to a very great extent; here, see ibid., 44–57. I am not sure, however, that “post-mythological” is the right description of this state: Coleridge has lost his confidence in his ability to prophesy; I am not aware of any evidence that he has lost his belief that prophecy is a possible activity. The standard comparison with Blake may perhaps make the point: Blake’s response to his loss of innocence is to create a fictitious mythology that claims to speak truth through inventions; Coleridge’s response will finally be to embrace traditional religion. A glance at a list of Coleridge’s poetry in date order will confirm this point. The daemonic poems were written 1797–1798; in 1799 Coleridge wrote numerous pieces exemplifying different meters, and translated some European poetry, but there are only a handful of original compositions. There are a few more in 1800, no more than eighty lines in 1801, Dejection and a few other pieces in 1802, and then only one poem each in 1803 and 1804. See The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity: The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). CCW 4.I, 461; italics in original. See particularly the Opus Maximum manuscript on this, where, for example, Coleridge will assert, “The Will, the absolute Will, is that which is essentially causative of reality, essentially, and absolutely…. This is our first principle” (CCW 15, 220). Hardy has suggested that this is a later position, and that earlier Coleridge took “the identity of being and act” as fundamental, rather than will (see Daniel W. Hardy, “Coleridge on the Trinity,” Anglican Theological Review 69, no. 2 [1987]: 145–155). This appears difficult: the stress on will is found as early as in The Friend of 1818 – as Hardy recognizes (see p. 152 of his article, referencing CCW 4.I, 523) – and is even hinted at in the Confessio Fidei of 1810 (CN III.4005). Conversely, the position Hardy claims as earlier is present in the Logic (CCW, 13 17, 82, 93), which dates from 1823 or after. The best explanation might be to follow a hint in the seventh thesis of chapter 12 of the Biographia Literaria (CCW 7.I, 276–280). There, Coleridge seems to identify being-and-act with will in the human person. It is not inconceivable that the two formulae were identical with reference to God as well, both pointing to God’s fundamental aseity and activity. For Coleridge’s own exposition of this, see a significant piece of “Marginalia” to Schelling reproduced in Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 164. This is an extension of the dialectical scheme used by Hegel, which Coleridge claims to have learned from the Pythagoreans. In addition to the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of the dialectic, Coleridge adds the prothesis (primordial unity prior to thesis and antithesis) and, from time to time, the mesothesis (a middle term between the thesis and antithesis); Coleridge calls the full scheme, including the mesothesis, his “noetic pentad.” Examples of its use can be found in CCW 9, 180–182; and CCW 11.II, 1347. See, for example, Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, 93–94; and Hardy’s analysis of this problem in Barth: Hardy, “Coleridge on the Trinity” 153. The Will “abideth in the Father, the Word and the Spirit, totally and absolutely in each, one and the same in all,” and is actualized in “the divine Nature and attributes” – God’s triune life (CCW 15, 222). On this, see G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952), 242–264, especially 263–264, where a passage of Ps.-Cyril which John of Damascus

94

42 43

44 45

46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

incorporated into The Orthodox Faith is referred to: “There is … one ousia, one goodness, one power, one will, one energy, one authority; one and identical; not three similar to each other, but a single identical motion of the three hypostaseis.” Prestige argues that this is a summary of the position held by the Greek Fathers from Origen, citing Athanasius and the Cappadocians in particular. See, for example, the Confessio Fidei (CN III, 4005) or the Aids to Reflection (CCW 9, 177). See again the discussion of Greek ideas of the Logos in Coburn, The Philosophical Lectures, where Coleridge uses a fragment of Speusippus to suggest that the Logos is “indivisibly united with, but yet not the same[,] as the absolute principle of causation, the Paternal One … nor yet, though indivisibly One with, is it the same as the energy of Love, the sanctifying Spirit” (175). See also CCW 15, 252,l where Coleridge hints at the same point, relying on the same words of Speusippus. On this point, see Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol. 1: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). The most sustained expositions of these philosophical arguments are from the various fragments of the unpublished Opus Maximum (CCW 15); as the editor, Thomas McFarland, points out, the intent of the genre of the magnum opus was precisely to deploy philosophy in rational defense of the Christian faith (clix–clxiv). Church Dogmatics II.2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957). Again, see Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol. 1. It is true that Coleridge’s plans for the Logosophia or Opus Maximum often included a commentary on St. John’s Gospel as a final item (see CCW 15, xcv–xcvii, cv–cxi, for some evidence of this assertion), but it remains the case that amongst all the writings he left there is no sustained treatment of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the particularity that it demands. Coleridge affirmed often enough that he believed these things, but they seem anomalous when put alongside his more systematic writings. This work was not completed in Coleridge’s lifetime; the fragments are collated and edited in CCW 15. There are two substantial chapters under the title “On The Divine Ideas” (available at the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, CA; MS HM8195; also Fragment 3 (214–290) in CCW 15) which form as complete an account of Coleridge’s doctrine of God as is to be found anywhere in his corpus. In outlining the argument contained therein, I will indicate via footnotes other places where Coleridge makes many of the same points, albeit in a much more fragmentary way. CCW 15, 218. CCW 15, 223; see also 231–233. Coleridge uses this phrase in this context in more than one place. See, for example, CN IV, 5294. CCW, 233, relying on the Biblical testimony “You are gods” (Psalms 82:6). CCW 15, 223. See CCW 15, 223–225. CCW 15, 246. See, for example, the extended discussion in Aids to Reflection (CCW 9, 265–291). See particularly the first part of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. CCW, 238. See CCW 15, 239–240. This argument, that evil must have had a beginning, is also made in Aids to Reflection. See CCW 9, 256.

COLERIDGE

95

60 CCW, 247. 61 Coleridge appears to include this sort of account of a “heavenly fall” in his summary of Reformed Christianity in the “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit” (1824; CCW 11.II, 1111–1171), where he includes as the second point “The Eternal Possibilities; the Actuality of which hath not its origin in God. – Apostasis Chaos Spirituale.” 62 CCW 15, 248–268. Coleridge was aware of this divergence from Plotinus, and attached importance to it, at least as early as 1816. See “The Trinity” in CCW 11.I, 413–416, and especially on 415: “the diversity (of endless importance) between the Trinity of Plotinus and the Athanasian Tri-unity.” 63 Again, this is a semi-regular theme throughout Coleridge’s mature writings. Even in the Biographia Literaria (largely written in 1815, although not published until 1817), Coleridge will refer to Plato as the pattern of Trinitarianism. See CCW 7.I, 180. 64 For a similar argument concerning true individuality, see Aids to Reflection (CCW 9, 292). 65 CCW 6, 55 (emphases in original). 66 See CCW 6, 56 and n.1 there. 67 CCW 9, 26. 68 CCW 9, 40. 69 Confessions (CCW 11.II, 1155–1156). 70 CCW 9, 205 (emphases in original). 71 CCW 11.II, 1119. 72 CCW 9, 310 in Coleridge’s note there. 73 CCW 9, 312. 74 CCW 10 (my emphasis). I have written more fully on this text in my Listening to the Past (Carlisle, Pa.: Paternoster, 2003), 137–152. 75 CCW 10, 24. 76 Coleridge never refers to the pentad in Church and State, but his constructions invite its application at almost every turn. 77 See CCW 10, 77, for an indication in this direction; also comments from his Table Talk (CCW 14, 219 [dated 1831], 570 [1832], and 380 [1833]). Also see a letter of June 1831 to William Sotheby (letter 1711 in CL VI, 861–867), where Coleridge speaks of the king as “ordained by God – i.e., as no Reflection, or Derivative from the (pretended) Sovereignty of the People, but as the lawful Representative, the consecrated Symbol of the Unity and Majesty of the Nation” (863). 78 CCW 10, 20 and n. there, and 41. 79 CCW 10, 14–16 for the discussion, and 16 for the quotation. 80 CCW 1. 81 CCW 6, 1–114. 82 CCW 11.II, 1111–1171. 83 CCW 11.II, 1136. 84 See CCW 6, 114 and n.2. 85 Jackson’s collections of estimations of Coleridge demonstrate this interestingly; particularly immediately after his death, there is near-unanimity that Coleridge was a great thinker, but total divergence over whether he left a system, or a series of brilliant but contradictory fragments. See J. R. De J. Jackson, Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970; Routledge, 1991).

96

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

Bibliography Barth, J. Robert. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine. New York: Fordham University Press, 1987. Hedley, Douglas. Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989. Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: HarperCollins, 1998. Newlin, Lucy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Perkins, Mary Anne. Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Pym, David. The Religious Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979.

CHAPTER 5

Kierkegaard David R. Law

A Passionate Thinker Valdemar Ammundsen, an early commentator on Kierkegaard’s work, once remarked, “Where Kierkegaard was wrong, that goes on his account. Where Kierkegaard was right, the bill comes to us.”1 We can rephrase this comment even more pointedly: “Where Kierkegaard was wrong, that is a matter between him and God. Where Kierkegaard was right, that is a matter between God and each and every one of us.” It is his ability to confront the reader – you and me – with the deepest issues of human existence, and to provoke us into asking questions of ourselves, the nature and purpose of our lives, and our relationship with God, that makes Kierkegaard such an uncomfortable and disturbing, yet exciting and invigorating, thinker. When we read Kierkegaard we are confronted with an author of passion, an author who wishes each of us to become passionate not about the things of the world but about Christianity. Our relationship with God should be a passionate love affair. Anything less is unworthy of God and demeaning to human beings. In his writings, Kierkegaard raises fundamental questions concerning the nature of human existence and the human being’s relationship with God. These are not abstract philosophical questions, but questions that are posed of each and every one of us. The answers we give to these questions determine the sort of people we are and the sort of God-relationship we have. In his writings Kierkegaard stresses repeatedly that it is not his intention to provide his reader with “information” or “knowledge,” but to challenge the reader – you and me – to think long and hard about what it is to be a self: not an abstract, philosophical self, but the self that you and I are and have the potential to become. Reading Kierkegaard is thus much more than merely an academic exercise; it is above all an exercise in self-discovery. It is this intention of Kierkegaard’s to prompt or provoke his readers into asking questions of themselves that accounts for the most

98

DAVID R. LAW

distinctive and puzzling features of his work, namely, the literary and stylistic diversity of his authorship, his use of pseudonyms, and his employment of what he calls “indirect communication.” The sheer diversity, richness, and complexity of the Kierkegaardian corpus present the reader with a considerable interpretative challenge. Kierkegaard’s works range from the aphoristic and novelistic to the psychological and philosophical. The situation is complicated still further by the fact that there are two distinct types of authorship, namely, the pseudonymous authorship and the works which Kierkegaard penned under his own name. Either/Or, for example, purports to be a collection of diverse manuscripts written by a hedonist, a magistrate, and a country parson, which were published by “Victor Eremita” after his chance discovery of them in a secondhand writing desk he had purchased. It was Kierkegaard’s custom to accompany the pseudonymous works with the publication of “upbuilding” and “Christian discourses” to which he appended his own name. The motivation for the remarkable diversity of Kierkegaard’s authorship is his conviction that existential and religious truths cannot be communicated directly, but must be imparted in such a way that the onus is on the reader to appropriate these truths. In pursuit of this aim of existentially educating the reader, Kierkegaard employs indirect communication. He constructs a Socratic dialogue with the reader, whereby the reader is prompted or provoked by the possibilities and open questions of Kierkegaard’s works to raise and answer questions concerning his or her own existence.2 It is this aim of existentially educating the reader that prompts his use of pseudonymity. Each pseudonym represents a “definite life-view,”3 which is presented to the reader as a possibility for his or her own existence. But Kierkegaard uses the pseudonyms not only to portray possible life-views, but also to criticize them. The pseudonyms interact with each other, highlighting the inadequacies of rival modes of existence. This can be seen at its clearest in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in which the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus summarizes and exposes the weaknesses of the existence-possibilities represented by the pseudonyms of earlier works.4 It is consequently ill advised to take the various views expressed in the pseudonymous works as Kierkegaard’s own. The convention in Kierkegaardian scholarship, following Kierkegaard’s exhortation in “A First and Last Explanation,”5 with which Postscript concludes, is to treat the pseudonymous writings as discrete works and to cite them by the names of the pseudonyms under which they were published. This does not mean, however, that there is nothing in the pseudonymous works to which Kierkegaard would personally subscribe. The pseudonyms that probably most closely represent Kierkegaard’s views are Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus, which is indicated by the fact that Kierkegaard was prepared to put his name as editor on the title page of the works penned by these pseudonyms. This raises two important, perennial questions in the interpretation of the Kierkegaardian corpus, namely, the unity of the authorship and the relationship between the pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous works. The answer to

KIERKEGAARD

99

the first question is provided by Kierkegaard in Point of View, in which he states that “my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian.”6 The unity of Kierkegaard’s authorship, then, is the existential education it offers the reader by exploring and ultimately discarding alternative worldviews on the road toward Christian existence. This unified religious purpose of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship provides us with the key to understanding the relationship between the pseudonymous works and the works penned under his own name. The pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous works are united by their common aim of leading the reader toward Christian existence. The non-pseudonymous works are more overtly religious meditations on themes touched upon in the pseudonymous works.

Life and Influences Kierkegaard was born into an age of significant industrial and political change. During his lifetime, Denmark took its first steps toward industrialization and democratization. In 1819 Denmark’s first steamship went into service, and in 1841 the government financed the construction of Denmark’s first railway between Altona and Kiel. In 1849 the transition was made from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy under Frederick VII (1848–1863). Kierkegaard’s age was the “Golden Age” of Danish culture (c. 1800–1870). Nineteenth-century Denmark was graced by such figures as the scientist Hans Christian Ørsted (1771–1851), the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), the poet Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), the churchman and hymn writer Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), the novelist Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), and of course Kierkegaard himself. It was into this age of cultural ferment and political and economic transition that Kierkegaard was born in 1813, the seventh and last child of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838) and Ane Sørendatter Lund (1768–1834). Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard exerted a profound influence on his son’s religious, intellectual, and psychological development. Having imbibed the Moravian sense of sin, emphasis on personal conversion, and understanding of Christ as the man of sorrows, he gave his children a strict religious upbringing. Michael Pedersen was also responsible for introducing his son to theological and philosophical thinking, and to the rigors of intellectual debate.7 After retiring from his clothing business at the age of forty, he had devoted himself to theology and philosophy. He took pleasure in engaging visitors to his home in theological and philosophical debate, his skill at which seems to have made a considerable impression on the young Kierkegaard. Among these visitors was J. P. Mynster (1775–1854), later Bishop of Zealand, who would play a significant role in the last phase of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Perhaps the most significant influence Michael Pedersen exerted on his son, however, was with regard to the development of Kierkegaard’s personality.

100

DAVID R. LAW

Michael Pedersen seems to have been tortured by guilt due possibly to his having cursed God as a young shepherd boy on the Jutland heath and to a sexual indiscretion with his maid, whom he subsequently married. He seems to have seen his good fortune in being taken in as an apprentice in his uncle’s clothing firm in Copenhagen and his subsequent success and wealth not as a blessing but as a divine curse. When his family was struck by a series of tragedies between 1832 and 1834, leaving him widowed and with Kierkegaard and his elder brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805–1888) as his only surviving children, Michael Pedersen seems to have believed that the divine curse he had so long expected was at last being visited upon him. None of his deceased children had lived beyond the age of thirty-three, the age at which Jesus had died, and he came to believe that he was condemned to outlive all his children, including Søren and Peter Christian.8 This guilt-ridden man seems to have instilled a melancholy disposition, a sense of guilt, and an aversion to sexuality in the young Kierkegaard. There are hints that Kierkegaard discovered his father’s sexual indiscretion,9 which may be the reason why he temporarily broke with his father. In 1830 Kierkegaard went up to Copenhagen University to study theology, which at that time was still under the influence of eighteenth-century rationalism, the foremost Danish exponent of which was H. N. Clausen (1793–1872). Change was in the air, however. German Romanticism was becoming increasingly influential, and through J. L. Heiberg (1791–1860) and H. L. Martensen (1808–1884), Hegelianism was beginning to make significant inroads into Danish intellectual life. Although Kierkegaard himself initially fell under the spell of Hegelianism, which supplied him with many of the impulses and concepts for the development of his thought, he also came under the influence of the philosopher F. C. Sibbern (1785–1872) and above all the poet Poul Møller (1794–1838), both of whom emphasized that life cannot be reduced to philosophical categories and yet who stressed that philosophy should be concerned to address life issues. It was Kierkegaard’s growing conviction that Hegel’s speculative philosophy failed to take human existence seriously that lay behind his later critique of Hegelianism, a critique which has led him to be seen, with Feuerbach and Marx, as one of the most significant critics of Hegel. After his break with his father, Kierkegaard neglected his studies and began to lead a “hedonistic” life, innocuous by today’s standards but sufficient to cause his father concern that his son was on the road to perdition. A reconciliation came about in the spring of 1838, and it was probably then that Michael Pedersen confided his terrible secret to his son: that he had cursed God and stood under divine condemnation, and that it was his fate to outlive his children. No sooner had Kierkegaard discovered the key to the interpretation of his existence, however, when it was shattered by the death of his father (1838), an event which prompted Kierkegaard to abandon his hedonistic lifestyle and to apply himself in earnest to his studies. He graduated in theology in 1840. A few months after his graduation, Kierkegaard got engaged to Regine Olsen, an event which was to have profound consequences for his development as a

KIERKEGAARD

101

writer. He seems to have had doubts about the wisdom of his marrying almost immediately after proposing.10 His vita ante acta, by which he probably meant his melancholy, the family guilt, and possibly his own sexual inhibitions, placed an insurmountable barrier preventing him from “realizing the universal” in the institution of marriage.11 In 1841, just over a year after proposing to Regine, he broke off the engagement and set sail for Berlin to escape the scandal he had caused. While in Berlin, Kierkegaard attended the lectures of the aged Schelling. After an initial burst of enthusiasm at Schelling’s emphasis on the importance of relating philosophy to reality,12 Kierkegaard quickly became disillusioned, commenting in a letter to his brother that Schelling’s “whole doctrine of potencies betrays the highest degree of impotence.”13 Disappointed, Kierkegaard returned to Copenhagen. It was during this period between the dissolution of his engagement and the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript in 1846 that Kierkegaard wrote the works that would establish his reputation. With the publication of Postscript, Kierkegaard intended to bring his literary production to a close and to seek ordination. Events transpired, however, which led him to abandon this plan and continue writing. In 1840 a satirical journal, The Corsair, had been founded by Meir Aaron Goldschmidt (1819–1887). Political satire was new in Denmark, and The Corsair was regarded by many as scandalous and offensive. Goldschmidt’s admiration for Kierkegaard had resulted in the latter initially being spared the attentions of the journal. P. L. Møller (1814–1865), however, one of The Corsair’s regular contributors, published a critique of Stages on Life’s Way in which he accused Kierkegaard of exploiting his unhappy relationship with Regine for literary purposes. Outraged, Kierkegaard responded by publishing an article in the newspaper The Fatherland, in which he linked Møller with The Corsair, thereby destroying Møller’s hopes of being appointed to the Chair of Aesthetics at Copenhagen University. Kierkegaard also unwisely complained that he had thus far been spared the attentions of The Corsair. This was soon remedied by the journal’s publication of a series of caricatures poking fun at Kierkegaard’s physical appearance, mode of dress, and relationship to Regine, the result of which was that Kierkegaard could not leave home without being ridiculed. Kierkegaard initially seems to have comforted himself with the thought of becoming a country parson. His increasing disquiet at the worldliness of the Danish clergy, however, made him hesitant to take this step. Indeed, he became increasingly conscious of the difference between the clergy, whom he held to be interested primarily in securing a good living, and the apostles, who were prepared to suffer and even to die for their faith. What the age needed was a martyr, a “witness to the truth” who would attest to the true nature of the Gospel, even to the point of suffering death for it. He consequently abandoned his plans to seek ordination and embarked upon a new phase of literary productivity aimed at confronting his contemporaries with “true” Christianity. Kierkegaard’s disgust with the church gradually came to focus on J. P. Mynster, since 1834 Bishop of Zealand and Primate of the Church of

102

DAVID R. LAW

Denmark. For Kierkegaard, Mynster embodied all that was wrong with contemporary Danish Christianity. He held his fire, however, first, out of respect and filial affection; and, second, because he seems to have hoped that Mynster would make a public confession “that what he has represented actually was not Christianity, but an appeasement.”14 On January 30, 1854, Mynster died. Martensen’s praise of Mynster in his funeral oration as a “witness to the truth” outraged Kierkegaard, for far from suffering for the Gospel Mynster had watered down Christianity’s demands and had gained considerable worldly advantage from it. But still he held his fire, possibly because he did not wish to influence the choice of Mynster’s successor or to hinder the public campaign to erect a monument in Mynster’s memory. Finally, in December 1854, Kierkegaard published an open attack on Mynster in The Fatherland. The public was shocked at this insult to the memory of a highly esteemed and popular bishop, and numerous indignant protests appeared in the press. In the course of this controversy, Kierkegaard but widened his attack to include the whole church, first in a series of articles in The Fatherland and then, from May 1855, in his own journal, The Moment. At the end of September 1855 Kierkegaard collapsed in the street, and on October 2 he was taken to Frederik’s Hospital, his inheritance exhausted by the tenth and final edition of The Moment. He died on November 11, 1855.

The “First Authorship”: Kierkegaard’s Authorship until 1846 Kierkegaard’s first full-length published work was From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), a critique of Hans Christian Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler, which Kierkegaard attacks for not having a “life-view.” This concern for a life-view, to find a “truth worth living or dying for,” as he puts it in an early journal entry,15 is a theme that runs through Kierkegaard’s authorship. Kierkegaard’s next significant work was his doctrinal dissertation The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. Although still showing signs of Hegelian influence, this youthful work contains nascent forms of the concepts that would dominate Kierkegaard’s future authorship: irony, subjectivity, existence as the synthesis of possibility and necessity, and the contrast between the figures of Christ and Socrates. Kierkegaard, however, dated his authorship from the publication of Either/Or (1843).16 Part I of this massive work comprises a diverse collection of pieces ranging from aphoristic “diapsalmata” to “The Diary of the Seducer.” Both the subject matter as well as the disparity and fragmentary nature of the themes discussed in the volume express the central features of what Johannes Climacus in Postscript terms the “aesthetic” sphere of existence. “A,” the pseudonymous author of part I of Either/Or, is an individual who lives according to the aesthetic life-view, the fundamental principle of which is pleasure. What the aesthetic individual does not realize is that his life-view is one that leads ultimately to despair. It lacks a

KIERKEGAARD

103

center or leading idea to hold the self together. The aesthetic self allows itself to be dissipated among the myriad possibilities life has to offer. Part II of Either/Or consists of two lengthy letters written by “B” to the aesthete of part I, to which is appended a brief sermon by a country parson. From his letters we learn that “B” is a magistrate, “Judge William,” who is concerned at the hedonistic lifestyle of his young friend, A. B strives to persuade A that the aesthetic enjoyment and fulfillment the latter craves can be achieved only through grounding the aesthetic in the ethical. Thus, to take B’s example of the love-relationship, love is truly realized only when the particularity of the individual love-affair is grafted onto the universal-human by being grounded in the ethical institution of marriage. The inherent despair of the aesthetic self through its dissipation in life’s myriad possibilities and the aesthetic individual’s consequent lack of a coherent self are overcome by the choice of the ethical. This ethical choice is initially a choice of despair. Despair is “personality’s doubt,” and by choosing despair17 the aesthetic individual accepts the inadequacy of his or her mode of existence and takes on “the absolute self or my self according to its absolute validity.”18 In choosing, the individual freely accepts responsibility for him or herself and, instead of conceiving of possibility as the source of aesthetic pleasure, understands possibility as a task. With this choice of the despairing self, the distinction between good and evil is posited, because the choice of despair constitutes an acknowledgment of, and application to oneself of, the categories of right and wrong. Either/Or concludes with a sermon written by a country priest, entitled the “Ultimatum,” which B has sent to A because it confirms the validity of the ethical life-view and will thus be of use in helping A out of his aesthetic mode of existence. B is mistaken, however. The “Ultimatum,” the theme of which is “The upbuilding that lies in the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong,” does not confirm the validity of the ethical but provides the first hints of its downfall. In his sermon the Pastor argues that before God all human beings are in the wrong, and that this is our joy, for it is by being in the wrong that we sustain a relationship with God. Far from confirming the ethical view of life espoused by B, then, the “Ultimatum” provides the first hints that the ethical sphere is not the full story. It is not getting right with God through ethical observation that determines our God-relationship, but becoming aware that we are wrong before God. The “Ultimatum,” then, is alluding to sin and providing the first hints of a mode of existence that cannot be contained in ethical categories. What Either/Or offers us, then, is, as Robert L. Perkins has pointed out, an either/ or/or.19 It is this second “or,” the religious life-view, which is arguably the main concern of the subsequent works. 1843 was a highly productive year for Kierkegaard. Besides Either/Or he published three collections of upbuilding discourses and two more pseudonymous works, namely, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, published under the pseudonyms Johannes de silentio and Constantin Constantius respectively. The first of these is a meditation on Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. Theologically

104

DAVID R. LAW

the book is significant for its conception of faith as a “movement by virtue of the absurd” and for the introduction of the notion of a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” This latter concept has elicited considerable scholarly attention and has prompted some commentators to accuse Kierkegaard of moral nihilism. The point Johannes de silentio seems to wish to make is one already hinted at in the “Ultimatum” of Either/Or, namely, that the God-relationship cannot be confined in the deontological ethics advocated by Judge William and that the ethical consciousness of the human self must have its grounding not in social and civic norms and standards but in God. Repetition is a psychological study by Constantin Constantius of the unhappy love affair of a young man of his acquaintance, much of which mirrors Kierkegaard’s experience with Regine. By “repetition,” Constantin means the restitution in a qualitatively new way of something believed to have been lost irrevocably. This restitution comes about not by means of human powers, however, but as a result of the initiative of God, for whom the impossible is possible. As the young man of Repetition says of Job, “So there is repetition, after all. When does it occur? Well, that is hard to say in any human language. When did it occur for Job? When every thinkable human certainty and probability were impossible.”20 1844 was another year of astonishing productivity for Kierkegaard. Besides three collections of upbuilding discourses, he published two significant and influential pseudonymous works, namely, Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus and Concept of Anxiety by Vigilius Haufniensis. The first of these works is a thinly disguised exposition of Christianity. Climacus undertakes a “thought-project” in which he constructs a form of religiousness opposite to “Socratic religiousness.” By “Socratic religiousness,” Climacus designates the view that the human being is in innate possession of the truth, or, to put it in religious terms, sustains a natural albeit obscured relationship to God. The task then becomes that of “recollecting” this innate but obscured truth and allowing it to inform one’s existence as fully as possible. This was the religiousness Kierkegaard felt was prevalent in the Hegelian-colored religion and state Christianity of his own age, albeit without Socrates’ existential intensity. But how, Johannes Climacus asks in the Fragments, would religion appear if the human being did not possess a natural propensity for a Godrelationship? What form would religion take if the human being were not in innate possession of the truth? Then the individual could not recollect a dimly remembered innate truth, for there is no innate truth to recollect. But if the human being is not in possession of the truth, then he or she must be in untruth. This state of being in untruth is more than an epistemological deficiency, however; it is a form of bondage in which the human being has freely chosen to flee from the truth. It is, Johannes Climacus tells us, sin. A consequence of this is that there is no role for the Socratic teacher, for there is no truth in the human being which such a teacher can bring to birth. The human being needs a different type of teacher, one who possesses the truth and is able to impart it to the untruthful, sinful human being. But this is still not

KIERKEGAARD

105

enough, for the human being, in bondage to sin, does not possess the resources either for recognizing or for appropriating the truth the teacher brings. Consequently, reason cannot be the means by which the human being accepts the truth offered by the teacher. The teacher must therefore provide not only the truth but also the condition for accepting the truth. Johannes Climacus suggests that the most appropriate term for this condition is faith.21 The claim that the teacher gives not only the truth but also the condition for accepting the truth to the human being raises two problems. First, what is the role of reason in the human being’s relationship to the truth? Secondly, is Johannes Climacus a determinist? In reply to the first question, it is well known that in many of his works Kierkegaard makes clear the limitations of reason. Indeed, his description of faith as a movement by virtue of the absurd in Fear and Trembling, and his description of the incarnation as a paradox in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, have led some commentators to accuse him of irrationalism. Reason, however, is not absent from faith. On the contrary, Johannes Climacus emphasizes the importance of reason. Reason is the means by which we distinguish between the paradox and nonsense. Furthermore, it is only by pushing reason to its limits that we arrive at the boundary at which a God-relationship – albeit always on divine initiative – can become a possibility.22 Although certain passages in both Fragments and Postscript can create the impression that Johannes Climacus is a determinist, closer examination of Climacus’s argument forces us to an altogether different view. Climacus’s point is that it is God who provides the condition by which the God-relationship becomes possible. It is not a human achievement but a divine gift. The condition that is faith entails release from the bondage of sin and restores human freedom. These constitute the condition of the truth, but, now that freedom has been restored, the human being must freely choose whether to accept the truth that is offered in and by the teacher. As Climacus puts it, “If I do not possess the condition … then all my willing is of no avail, even though, once the condition is given, that which was valid for the Socratic is again valid.”23 The Concept of Anxiety was published on June 14, 1844, four days after the appearance of Philosophical Fragments. With its abstract and technical style, it appears at first sight to be a very different work from Fragments. Nevertheless, the two works are connected in that the Concept of Anxiety takes up the themes of freedom and sin touched upon in Fragments. In Fragments, Climacus tells a parable to illustrate the origins of the loss of freedom and bondage to sin.24 Before a battle, a knight arrives on the scene and is asked by each of the hostile armies to join the battle on their side. He makes his choice, but chooses the losing side and is taken captive. His subsequent attempt to join the victorious side is rebuffed. The terms offered to him before the battle no longer apply now that the battle is over. The knight is bound by his earlier decision. A similar state of affairs applies to the sinner. The sinner, too, has chosen sides and is now bound by the decision he or she has made. But what leads the human being to choose sin?

106

DAVID R. LAW

It is this transition from innocence to sin and the nature of original or “hereditary” sin that Vigilius Haufniensis explores in the Concept of Anxiety. Vigilius generally accepts the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, but reformulates it in psychological terms in order to leave room for human freedom and responsibility for sin. The human self, Vigilius tells us, is a “synthesis” of the psychical and the physical,25 and the temporal and the eternal.26 It is the task of the self to bring these dipolar elements into a coherent structure, and the manner in which the self goes about this task determines the nature of that self. Anxiety is the disquiet the self experiences in the face of this task. The self suffers anxiety because it has the capacity to choose. As Vigilius puts it, anxiety is “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy”27 in which the self is both attracted to and repelled by its possibility. The transition from innocence to sin is a consequence of this anxiety. Vigilius describes anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.”28 In this free but anxious choice of finitude, sin is posited. This is the transition which Adam made and which all subsequent human beings make. For Vigilius, the Fall was not a single, unique historical act the consequences of which are passed down genetically from generation to generation. Such an understanding would place Adam in a qualitatively different position from all other human beings and would, moreover, negate human freedom, for if human beings are predestined to sin by the inheritance of original sin they cannot be held responsible for their sin. The difference between Adam and all subsequent human beings, Vigilius argues, is not qualitative but quantitative. The long history of human sin since Adam has produced an increase in the quantity of sin in the world. This creates an environment in which the anxious vertigo of the innocent human being is intensified. It does not, however, cause the innocent individual to make the transition from innocence to sin. Like Adam many generations before, every human being falls through an act of freedom in which, disorientated by freedom, he or she grasps finitude and falls into sin. Stages on Life’s Way (1845) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) can both be regarded as a summing up and taking stock of the previous works. In Stages on Life’s Way, many of the characters already encountered in earlier works reappear. The work falls into three unequal sections. Part 1, “In vino veritas,” takes the form of a dinner party modeled after Plato’s symposium, at which the five diners hold speeches on “erotic love or the relation between man and woman.”29 In part 2, we renew our acquaintance with Judge William, who once again is concerned to defend the institution of marriage, although now he is more ready to acknowledge the possibility of religiously justified exceptions to the duty of marriage. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book from the theological perspective, however, is part 3, which falls into two sections, namely, “Quidam’s Diary” and Frater Taciturnus’s psychological study of Quidam and his failed love-relationship. In the course of this study, religious themes emerge in the consideration of guilt and its role in the God-relationship. Whereas parts 1

KIERKEGAARD

107

and 2 of Stages on Life’s Way map roughly onto the aesthetic writings of Either/ Or I and onto Judge William’s two letters of Either/Or II, respectively, the final section of Stages seems to be an extension and deepening of themes touched upon in the “Ultimatum” with which Either/Or closes. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments is, as its name indicates, a sequel to Philosophical Fragments, albeit one which far outstrips in length the work to which it is allegedly only an addendum. It is the nearest Kierkegaard comes to a “systematic” presentation of his thought. Many of the themes of the earlier works are taken up and presented in the broader context of Johannes Climacus’s question: how do I become a Christian? It is in this context that Kierkegaard introduces his famous, or perhaps infamous, thesis that “truth is subjectivity.” Of all aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought, this is probably the most controversial and arguably the most misunderstood. Contrary to the claims of some commentators, Climacus is not claiming that we can invent the truth or that intensity of belief guarantees the validity of that belief. Climacus is concerned with ethical, religious, and existential truth. His point is that it is not sufficient to understand such truth merely intellectually; it is necessary that each of us embody it and bring it to expression in our own lives. The concept of subjectivity is developed in order to unfold the nature of being, or rather becoming, a self. As such it is closely connected with Climacus’s concept of “existence,” a term which he employs in a specialized sense to refer not to simple facticity such as stones and plants possess but to a qualitative type of existence distinctive to the human being. This qualitative type of existence arises from the contradictory nature of the human being as an infinite and eternal self situated within the finite and the temporal. This contradiction presents the human being with the task of becoming a self within the temporal and finite structures of history. Subjectivity plays an important role in this because it is the means by which the self appropriates, actualizes, and embodies what it conceives to be the truth or life-view according to which it is called upon to organize itself. Human existence is not static, nor does it possess a fixed essence; it is a task arising out of the eternal self being situated within finite and temporal existence. Climacus explores the task of becoming a self by means of his theory of the spheres of existence, which also provides a framework for the interpretation of the earlier pseudonymous works. In the Postscript, he lists four existence-spheres open to the human being, namely, the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, and religiousness A and B. The difference between the various existence-spheres is determined by the way in which they resolve the contradiction of human existence, namely, that of being an infinite and eternal self situated within the finite and the temporal. The aesthete externalizes the existential contradiction. As Climacus puts it, “Immediacy, the esthetic, finds no contradiction in existing; to exist is one thing, contradiction is something else that comes from without.”30 The aesthetic individual thus exists in what Climacus calls “the esthetic dialectic between fortune and misfortune”31 and is undialectical in him or herself.32 For the aesthete,

108

DAVID R. LAW

eternity is a never-ending succession of “nows,” each one of which offers the possibility of enjoyment, before passing away to be replaced by the next pleasurable moment. Time is fragmented, for the past and the future are dissolved into the present moment, the consequence of which is that the aesthetic self is also fragmented among the myriad and disparate pleasures offered by the moment. The ethico-religious individual, on the other hand, is the individual who has become conscious of and acts upon the existential contradiction of being an eternal and infinite self situated in temporal and finite existence. Time takes on a new quality. It is no longer a never-ending flux but is a time of decision. The moment is consolidated in the decision. As such, it is not past but is remembered and repeated in the present and future. With decision, then, the past and the future are posited. The individual chooses him or herself not once, but repeatedly, a choice which manifests itself in commitment, resolution, and constancy. Thus love is not dissolved in a flux of erotic moments, but is consolidated in marriage. Thereby past, present, and future are unified and the human being acquires a coherent self. The aesthetic conception of eternity as an infinity of transitory experiences is replaced with the eternity of ethical resolution. Religiousness A is the “religion of immanence”; it assumes a fundamental affinity between eternity and existence and understands the existential task as being that of the self ’s “recollection” of this affinity. As Climacus puts it with regard to the God-relationship, religiousness A is “an evolution within the total category of human nature.”33 That is, religiousness A assumes that the human being possesses the condition for a God-relationship. The dialectic of religiousness A is thus a “dialectic of inward deepening,” in which the self appropriates the truth of its affinity with the eternal and strives to restructure its existence accordingly. As Climacus puts it, religiousness A “is the relation to an eternal happiness that is not conditioned by a something but is the dialectical inward deepening of the relation, consequently conditioned only by the inward deepening, which is dialectical.”34 It is this dialectic of inward deepening that accounts for both the similarities and differences between religiousness A and the ethical sphere. The similarities lie in the common assumption of a fundamental, although obscured, compatibility between eternity and existence. The difference between the two lies in their assessment of the human being’s resources for resolving the existential contradiction. Climacus points out that the choice of despair recommended by Judge William cannot result in the individual “winning himself,” because the individual exhausts his or her strength in choosing despair and consequently “cannot come back by [himself].”35 In religiousness A, the human being has become far more profoundly aware of the difficulties of being an eternal and infinite self situated in temporal and finite existence. He or she strives to resolve this contradiction by subordinating the self to the greatest possible degree to the “absolute telos” that is God. This entails “becoming nothing before God,” “suffering,” and “guilt-consciousness,” all of which constitute marks of a God-centered existence.

KIERKEGAARD

109

In religiousness B or “Christian religiousness,” religiousness A is not annulled but intensified. The difference between religiousness A and B is that the latter is “dialectical in the second instance”36 as a result of eternity’s entry into time. Eternity’s irruption into time, or, to express the same point in religious language, God becoming a human being, is the absolute paradox, because in the person of the God-man mutually contradictory qualities – the eternal and the temporal, the infinite and the finite, and the divine and the human – are united. As Climacus puts it, “That God has existed in human form, has been born, grown up, and so forth, is surely the paradox sensu strictissimo, the absolute paradox.”37 The paradox of God’s presence in time is incomprehensible to reason, for the God-man “is compounded in a way contradictory to all thinking.”38 Indeed, in the presence of the paradoxical irruption of the eternal into time, reason becomes a “clod and a dunce.”39 Furthermore, the paradox makes clear to human beings that they are not in possession of the condition necessary for a relationship with God and that there can therefore be no question of recollecting the truth. God is not to be found in the depths of the self, accessible by means of the dialectic of inward deepening; on the contrary, the paradox reveals that God and the human are not united at some deeper level, but are separated from one another by an “infinite qualitative abyss.” Subjectivity is consequently not the truth but the untruth, for the human self does not possess the resources for establishing a relation to the eternal. The Christian expression for this radical separation of eternity and existence, God and the human, is sin. This transforms and sharpens the religious task. Whereas in religiousness A the task was that of the self ’s “recollection” of its fundamental affinity with eternity and its structuring of its life accordingly, in religiousness B the task is that of relating oneself to the paradoxical presence of the eternal-in-time. The response to the absolute paradox and the crisis into which this plunges the human being is faith. The paradoxical nature of the incarnation allows Kierkegaard to address the problem Lessing raises in his On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power that “accidental truths of history can never become proof of necessary truths of reason.”40 In Fragments and Postscript, as well as in the later Practice in Christianity (1850), Kierkegaard addresses this issue by developing the concept of “contemporaneity.” For Lessing it was only the immediate contemporaries of Christ who were able to form a judgment on the status of Jesus of Nazareth. Later generations are dependent upon historical reports of Christ’s life and ministry, which, Lessing argues, are an insufficient basis for faith. Both Climacus and Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Practice in Christianity, argue, however, that immediate contemporaneity is of no advantage with regard to the absolute paradox. Christ is the paradoxical union of the eternal and the temporal, the infinite and the finite, and the divine and the human, and this is just as much a paradox for Jesus’ contemporaries as it is for later generations. For the same reason, later generations have no advantage over Christ’s contemporaries, even though the historical consequences of Christ’s life have now become apparent. There is, Anti-Climacus points out, no ascending scale of human greatness to the point where human greatness reaches such a high level that it becomes divinity.41 All

110

DAVID R. LAW

human beings, whether they knew Christ personally or only on the basis of the historical record, are in the same position. All are confronted by the absolute paradox of the God-man and faced with the same choice: faith or offense. To this last phase of Kierkegaard’s “first authorship” belongs Two Ages. This little book is a review of a novel of the same name by Thomasine GyllembourgEhrensvärd (1773–1856), which draws a contrast between the French Revolution and the present age. Kierkegaard uses the novel as a springboard for his own reflections on the modern age. Whereas the revolutionary age was an age of passion and action, he writes, “The present age is essentially a sensible, reflecting age, devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial, short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence.”42 The consequence of this superficiality is that although bourgeois society pays lip service to such authorities as the Church, it too overthrows them, albeit not with passion and action like the French revolutionaries but by emptying them of their content, for bourgeois society “lets everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out of it.”43 It allows a pall of worldliness to descend upon everything, including, most importantly, religion. The result of this is “levelling,” a process which reduces human beings to the lowest common denominator and robs them of the potential for authentic selfhood. As we saw earlier, Kierkegaard understands the human being as existing in a tension between opposing categories. This tension and the task of becoming a self which it entails are eliminated by the leveling processes of bourgeois society. It is precisely the tensions, conflicts, and tragic dimension of existence that lead to authentic selfhood, and it is precisely these essential human qualities that bourgeois worldliness and comfortableness remove. This critique of the leveling tendencies of modern society prompts Kierkegaard to attack the “crowd” and the press, both of which in his view annihilate the human individuality essential for a relationship with the eternal. It would, however, be a mistake to understand this attack as due to a reactionary, undemocratic spirit on Kierkegaard’s part. His critique is motivated by a concern with the herd instinct that prompts human beings to follow blindly the majority opinion instead of choosing themselves as selves before God. Similarly, Kierkegaard’s attack on the press is not a rejection of freedom of speech as such but is a protest against the press’s tendency to reduce human beings to spectators and thereby undermine the existential commitment and action necessary for the individual’s relation to the eternal. In an age of mass media and global communications, Kierkegaard’s critique has acquired a new relevance.

The “Second Authorship”: Kierkegaard’s Authorship from 1846 to 1855 With the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Two Ages, Kierkegaard brought to a close a five-year period of remarkable literary productivity. He now intended to wind up his writing and seek ordination. Troubled,

KIERKEGAARD

111

however, about doubts concerning his fitness for the ministry and increasingly concerned at the “unchristian” nature of contemporary Christianity, he abandoned this plan and returned to writing. From 1846 onward, however, his writing takes on a different quality. He moves increasingly away from the indirect communication of the earlier works and makes less frequent use of pseudonyms. His writing becomes more overtly Christian and more direct in its address to the reader. The task is no longer that of subtly educating the reader toward Christian existence, but of confronting the reader with the fact that what he or she takes to be Christianity is a parody of the Gospel. Kierkegaard’s second authorship is a call to radical Christian discipleship. The first work in his new period of authorship was The Book on Adler, which Kierkegaard completed in 1847, but which was not published until after his death. The book deals with the case of Adolph Peter Adler (1817–1869), a pastor who claimed to have received a revelation from Christ and who Bishop Mynster subsequently dismissed from his post in 1845. In The Book on Adler, Kierkegaard discusses the concept of revelation and considers what form revelation would take if it were to take place in the present age. Kierkegaard was particularly concerned with the question of the nature of the “extraordinary,” the exceptional individual authorized to communicate divine revelation, and the dreadful responsibility such an individual must bear concerning whether he or she had understood aright the divine message or was guilty of having misheard it. Such an exceptional individual must also expect to suffer opposition from the world and be prepared to pay the ultimate price for his or her communication of the divine revelation he or she has received. This theme of suffering is picked up in Christian Discourses (1848) and Two Ethical-Religious Treatises “by H. H.” (1849), the latter being one of the few pseudonymous works of this period of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Christian Discourses is noteworthy also for its critique of pseudo-Christianity, a critique which would increase in ferocity in the coming years. In 1847 Kierkegaard published Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and Works of Love. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits comprises three discourses, namely, “An Occasional Discourse” on “Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing,” “What We Learn from the Lilies in the Field and from the Birds of the Air,” and the “The Gospel of Sufferings,” all of which are concerned with what it means to be a human being in the presence of God, namely, willing the good, not being anxious, and suffering for one’s faith. Works of Love is a meditation on the biblical commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself,” and is concerned with the social and communal dimension of Christian existence. The self-choice by which the human being becomes an authentic self entails becoming a social self, a self that sustains a relationship of love to others. Indeed, it is only the individual who has chosen him or herself that is capable of sustaining a genuine relationship of love with other human beings which does not succumb to the “levelling” effects of mass society in which the individuality and distinctiveness of human beings are ignored. Through choosing ourselves as selves before God we discover true

112

DAVID R. LAW

leveling, namely, the equality that exists between ourselves and our fellow human beings, equality that is not achieved by reducing them to the lowest common denominator, but which honors and respects them both in their human distinctiveness and in their equality before God. This is true love of neighbor. Kierkegaard’s last pseudonymous works were Sickness unto Death (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850), both written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus but published with Kierkegaard’s own name appended as “editor” on the title page. Both works constitute a radical demonstration of the Christian ideal. In Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus describes the self as “a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relation relating itself to itself in the relation.” This self-relating relation that constitutes the self is posited only when the self relates itself to that which has established it as such a relation.44 Two points are expressed in this terse and highly abstract definition of selfhood. Firstly, becoming a self is a task. Our selves are not simply “given,” but are something for which we must take responsibility. Secondly, selfhood is posited only when, as Anti-Climacus puts it, “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it,”45 namely, God. The failure of the self to relate itself to God is described by Anti-Climacus as despair, a disease of the self that is the psychological expression of sin. Much of Sickness unto Death is concerned with the pathological conditions that arise when the self fails to sustain an adequate self-relating relationship to God. The antidote to the disease of the self is faith. Only in faith is the self adequately posited, and despair overcome. This faith is made possible by the gracious coming of God to humanity in the person of his son, Jesus Christ. It is the nature of this faith that is the central theme of Anti-Climacus’ other work, namely, Practice in Christianity. In this work Anti-Climacus takes up and radicalizes many of the themes treated by Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Thus, the theme of contemporaneity is taken up again but is now sharpened in a number of ways. First, the contemporaneity that is faith is described more prominently in terms of the choice between faith and offense. Second, Christ is understood as the “pattern” or “prototype” (in Danish, Forbilledet), that is, as the paradigm according to which every Christian must strive to model his or her life. This, as both Anti-Climacus and Kierkegaard himself in For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself (1851–1852) make clear, entails participating in Christ’s suffering. Christian discipleship is not triumphalist but means taking upon oneself the cross of Christ and sharing in his suffering at the hands of the world. Only then is the individual a “witness to the truth.” From 1850 to 1855 Kierkegaard published only minor works. Between 1852 and 1853 he did not produce anything at all, although his journal entries increased prodigiously. His last publications, articles in The Fatherland and The Moment, and two discourses on “What Christ’s Judgement Is about Official Christianity” and “God’s Unchangeableness,” constitute a call to radical Christian discipleship and, consistent with this, continue in the sharpest and most provocative terms his attack on the allegedly fraudulent Christianity of the state church.

KIERKEGAARD

113

Of all of Kierkegaard’s authorship, these final works are perhaps the most problematic. In many respects they are a continuation of Kierkegaard’s longstanding aim of confronting his contemporaries with the challenge of the Gospel and compelling them to take Christianity seriously. His aim of shaking his fellow Danes out of their religious complacency, however, was accompanied by a portrayal of Christianity that involved not merely dying to the world but also becoming openly hostile to it. In so far as his contemporaries desired the consolations of Christianity without its obligations, Kierkegaard’s critique has some justification. His attack can be regarded as an early critique of culture Protestantism, an unholy alliance between Church and State, in which Christianity is reduced to the role of sanctifier of the norms of bourgeois society. In the process of making this attack, however, the life-affirming dimension of Christianity is in danger of being overlooked. The theme of grace, prominent in earlier works, retreats increasingly into the background, and a picture of Christianity emerges in which Christ’s yoke is far from easy and light, but instead threatens to crush the individual who takes Kierkegaard’s exposition of Christianity seriously. Kierkegaard himself was aware of the one-sidedness of his portrayal of Christianity, but saw this one-sidedness as essential to his role as a “corrective” to established Christianity.46 Only by ignoring the positive but shedding as much light as possible on what was wrong in contemporary society could a revival of Christianity be brought about. As Kierkegaard put it on embarking on the second phase of his authorship, “Henceforth I will write in such wise as to irritate people into facing the issues. I can compel no man to agree with my opinions, but at least I can compel him to have an opinion.”47

Kierkegaard’s Achievement It is hardly surprising that a thinker who placed such great emphasis on the task of each single individual becoming a self before God and who abhorred the idea of attracting “followers” should not have established a school or movement. Kierkegaard can hardly be said to have created a theological agenda. What he has bequeathed to theology is a series of impulses that have fed into theological and philosophical thinking. But it was not for professional theologians that Kierkegaard wrote his works, nor was it his intention to make a contribution to theological and doctrinal development. His task, as he saw it, was to compel his contemporaries to take the Christian faith utterly seriously, namely, existentially. Indeed, as he puts it in Postscript, “Christianity is not a doctrine, but … is an existence-communication.”48 In short, we only “know” Christianity when we live it. Other than his unquantifiable impact on the existential and religious development of his readers, Kierkegaard’s influence has been to provide subsequent thinkers with impulses for their own thought. The disparate, fragmentary, and unsystematic nature of his writings has been answered by an equally diverse

114

DAVID R. LAW

reception of his thought that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. His influence can be detected in the works of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus, all of whom owe a literary debt to Kierkegaard. It is, however, in theological and philosophical circles that his thought has had perhaps its greatest impact. In Britain, it was the Scottish theologians H. R. Mackintosh and P. T. Forsyth who did more than anyone to introduce Kierkegaard to the British public. In Britain and America, however, Kierkegaard’s influence remained insignificant until after the Second World War, when the translations undertaken by Alexander Dru, David F. Swenson, and Walter Lowrie made Kierkegaard known in the English-speaking world. It was above all in Germany, however, that Kierkegaard’s influence was most keenly felt. Although the first German translations of Kierkegaard’s works had begun to appear in the 1860s, the First World War and the subsequent disintegration of the optimism and historicism of prewar liberal theology lent a new significance to Kierkegaard’s work and led to him becoming a significant figure on the German theological and philosophical landscape. Kierkegaard’s exposition of the human condition, his emphasis on the transcendence of God, the paradoxical nature of the incarnation, and the leap of faith struck a chord in a generation deeply traumatized by the horrors of the war. Kierkegaard is considered to be a forerunner of existentialism. Thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre owe much to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the single individual and his development of such concepts as existence, freedom, choice, and anxiety. These thinkers, however, exploit Kierkegaard’s thought in a way of which Kierkegaard would hardly have approved, for they remove the ultimate goal of Kierkegaard’s authorship, namely, that of educating the human being into a Christ-centered God-relationship. In part via existential philosophy, Kierkegaard came to exercise a significant influence on twentieth-century theology. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber, the Catholic thinker Gabriel Marcel, and the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich all owe a significant debt to Kierkegaard. Barth’s theology also bears the mark of Kierkegaardian influence, above all in his appropriation of Kierkegaard’s concept of an infinite qualitative abyss between God and humankind. Barth, however, later distanced himself from Kierkegaard on the grounds that the latter’s emphasis on subjectivity supported the anthropocentrism that, in his opinion, had plagued Christian theology since Schleiermacher. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the demands of the Gospel left insufficient space for divine grace, a criticism which, in light of the world-negating tone of the later works, has some justification. More recently, Kierkegaard has come to be seen as a forerunner of postmodernism and has been taken up in the postmodernist critique of logocentrism. There is indeed much in Kierkegaard’s critique of modernity, suspicion of objectivity, and awareness of the problematic nature of language that ties in with postmodernist themes. There is, however, an essential difference between

KIERKEGAARD

115

Kierkegaard and postmodernism. Underlying the apparently postmodernist strands of Kierkegaard’s thought is the conviction that there is an authentic voice to be heard, a voice that is heard only when the individual withstands the pressures of modernity and embarks upon Christian discipleship. Kierkegaard saw himself as a “corrective,” and this is perhaps still the most appropriate way to understand his relationship to the Christian faith. He was consciously opposed to “systematization” and did not produce a dogmatic or systematic theology. Kierkegaard wished to educate and, in the last years of his life, provoke his contemporaries into taking the claims and challenge of the Gospel seriously. In our age, which has to a large degree lost touch with the Christian demands advanced so vigorously by Kierkegaard, he can still provide us with an insight into the existential struggle that is faith. In a fragmented, pluralistic world in which there yet still exists an unfulfilled spiritual yearning, Kierkegaard may provide us with the resources for thinking through and, still more importantly, appropriating faith in a postmodern, post-Christian world.

Notes All works are by Søren Kierkegaard (either pseudonymously or non- pseudonymously) unless otherwise specified. 1 Quoted by Howard A. Johnson in his introduction to Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), xxxiii. 2 A truly Kierkegaardian study of Kierkegaard’s work should therefore itself be written in indirect communication and under a pseudonym! 3 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, I:627. 4 See “A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature,” in Postscript, I: 251–300. 5 Postscript, I:625–630. 6 Point of View, 23. Some commentators, however, see this as a later rationalization on Kierkegaard’s part and hold that this religious interest was by no means as prominent in the early works as the later Kierkegaard suggests. 7 See the probably autobiographical introduction to Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est. 8 Journals and Papers, 5:5430. 9 See, for example “Solomon’s Dream” in Stages on Life’s Way, 250–252. 10 Journals and Papers, 6:6472. 11 Journals and Papers, 5:5664. 12 Journals and Papers, 5:5535. 13 Letter and Documents, 70. 14 Journals and Papers, 6:6853. 15 Journals and Papers, 5:5100. 16 Point of View, 23; cf. Postscript, I:251. 17 Either/Or, II:211, 218–219. 18 Either/Or, II:219.

116

DAVID R. LAW

19 Robert L. Perkins, “Either/Or/Or: Giving the Parson His Due,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or, Part II, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995). 20 Repetition, 212. 21 Fragments, 59. 22 Fragments, 39. 23 Fragments, 63. 24 Fragments, 16–17. 25 Concept of Anxiety, 43 26 Concept of Anxiety, 85. 27 Concept of Anxiety, 42. 28 Concept of Anxiety, 61. 29 Stages on Life’s Way, 30–31. 30 Postscript, I:572. 31 Postscript, I:4444. 32 Postscript, I:461, I:537, I:572. 33 Cf. Postscript, I:559. 34 Postscript, I:556. 35 Postscript, I:258. 36 Postscript, I:556. 37 Postscript, I:217: cf. I:210. 38 Postscript, I: 579. 39 Fragments, 59. 40 See Postscript, I: 93–106. 41 Practice in Christianity, 27. 42 Two Ages, 68. 43 Two Ages, 77. 44 Sickness unto Death, 13–14. 45 Sickness unto Death, 22. 46 Journals and Papers, 6:6467. 47 Papirer V1112 B 193 (p. 301). 48 Postscript, I: 379–380.

Bibliography Primary Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols., ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978. Letters and Documents, trans. Henrik Rosenmeier. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

KIERKEGAARD

117

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Either/Or, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Stages on Life’s Way, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Early Polemical Writings, ed. and trans. Julia Watkin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself! ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Christian Discourses/The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Prefaces/Writing Sampler, ed. and trans. Todd W. Nichol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Without Authority, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. The Book on Adler, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. The Moment and Late Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. The Point of View, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, in cooperation with the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Copenhagen, multiple vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007–.

118

DAVID R. LAW

Secondary The secondary literature on Kierkegaard is enormous. The following is a brief selection. Elrod, John W. Kierkegaard and Christendom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Evans, C. Stephen. Passionate Reason. Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Evans, C. Stephen. Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love. Divine Commands and Moral Obligations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Evans, C. Stephen. Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. Ferreira, M. Jamie. Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s “Works of Love.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Ferreira, M. Jamie. Kierkegaard. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Garff, Joakim. Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Gouwens, David J. Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hannay, Alistair. Kierkegaard. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Hannay, Alistair. Kierkegaard: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kirmmse, Bruce H. Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Law, David R. Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Lippitt, John. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling. London: Routledge, 2003. Marino, Gordon D. The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pattison, George. Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith. London: SPCK, 1997. Pattison, George. Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses. London: Routledge, 2002. Perkins, Robert L. (ed.). International Kierkegaard Commentary. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984. Rae, Murray A. Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.

CHAPTER 6

Newman Frank M. Turner

It is a fine point whether John Henry Newman (1801–1890) should be considered a theologian. He was a fellow of Oriel College, an ordained priest of the Church of England, and Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Later, after converting to Roman Catholicism and being ordained a Roman Catholic priest, he established the Oratory of St. Philip Neri located in Birmingham. In the 1850s for several years he presided over the Catholic University in Dublin. He then returned to Birmingham for the rest of his life, continuing to write on religious subjects and to rework and revise the publications of his Anglican years. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII named him a cardinal. In no sense, however, was he ever a professional or academic theologian. Rather in both his Christian communions Newman functioned primarily as a brilliant, engaged ecclesiastical polemicist contributing to both inter- and intradenominational disputes. Identity is one of the first issues confronting the student of Newman. There was, of course, only one John Henry Newman, but because of his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 contemporaries and later commentators saw his life and thought as falling into two distinct periods. Newman’s continuing to remain best known through his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), which recounts his conversion, further supports the temptation to interpret his thought through lenses of denominational bifurcation. Yet major continuities mark his long and sometimes tempestuous life. Newman as both an Anglican and a Roman Catholic embodied the quintessential nineteenth-century Christian seeker, the quintessential restless religious mind in motion. Newman’s life and thought stood embedded in the complex, multifaceted process of the emergence of religious pluralism in nineteenth-century England. First, as a result of parliamentary legislation between 1827 and 1834, the Church of England lost its political monopoly, and Protestant Nonconformists and Roman Catholics achieved new civic and political recognition.1 Second, as a result of the new political landscape, all of the English and Irish Christian denominations had

120

FRANK M. TURNER

to reassess internally their strategies for establishing their position and influence in the novel religious marketplace. This necessity for strategic reassessment and repositioning, which itself stretched over several decades, created new intradenominational parties within all the major churches. In both the Church of England and the English Roman Catholic Church, Newman’s career intimately related to these dynamic movements toward religious pluralism, sometimes resisting and sometime contributing to them, and in turn being shaped by them. Newman’s personal determination to carve out his own sphere of personal religious initiative and theological liberty made him the odd man out in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic Churches. In the 1830s he differed sharply from the major leaders of the Church of England as to the best way for that institution to respond to contemporary ecclesiastical change. His quarrels with Anglican authorities eventually led to his move to Rome. Later, while in the Roman Catholic Church, Newman differed from most of the English hierarchy over the best way for the Roman Catholic Church to establish a strong presence in the nation. He furthermore dissented from the growing ecclesiastical and doctrinal centralization that characterized midcentury Roman Catholicism. His differences with Roman Catholic ultramontanes led to his very considerable isolation within the English Roman Catholic Church. In both communions Newman found it repeatedly necessary to defend himself and to negotiate, often with modest success, a safe and secure place for himself and those attracted to his ideas. John Henry Newman was born in 1801 to Anglican parents. In 1816, while a student at Ealing School, the adolescent Newman experienced a powerful, personal religious experience or conversion under the tutelage of Walter Mayers, an evangelical cleric and instructor at the school. The same year Newman entered Trinity College Oxford, graduating in 1821 after poor performance on his examinations. The next year, upon successful completion of a separate fellowship examination, he became a Fellow of Oriel College, remaining one until a few days before his reception as a Roman Catholic. From 1826 to 1832 Newman provided tutorial instruction in Oriel College, after which under difficult circumstances his formal college instructional duties concluded. Commencing in 1828 he served for fifteen years as vicar of St. Mary the Virgin, the unofficial University Church in Oxford, where his sermons, often preached at Evensong, drew considerable numbers of students and a significant readership from that time to the present. There he preached a message of the necessity of rigorous obedience in opposition to what he regarded as the too-easy evangelical message of salvation that appealed to religious emotions. In 1833 Newman and other Oxford-related figures entered the acrimonious debate over the future of the Church of England. Known as the Tractarians because of their publication of Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), this group advocated a radical sacramental clericalism that distinguished the evangelical Christians in both the English Church and the Nonconformist denominations. Whereas evangelicals believed grace came to an individual through a subjective conversion experience provoked by preaching, the Tractarians urged that grace could be

NEWMAN

121

communicated only through sacraments administered by episcopally ordained priests. Evangelicals inside and outside the English Church argued that a person might endanger his or her salvation without a conversion experience; the Tractarians raised the same specter for the person lacking access to valid sacraments. The point of Tractarian theology was to assign an exclusive sacramental spiritual power and authority to Church of England clergy and by the same arguments to deny such authority to Dissenting clergy. Tractarian criticisms fell equally upon Anglican evangelicals and roused a predictably hostile response within the Church of England, which the Tractarians expected and sometimes sought. In the Apologia Newman would present his career during these years as a struggle against liberalism, an entity that remained ill defined in his usage. In point of fact, however, from the late 1820s through 1845 the Tractarian Newman directed his energy and prose primarily against evangelical religion and eventually against historic Protestantism.2 As Newman wrote in 1850 (in contrast to statements in the Apologia), what the Tractarians had most hated was “their great and deadly foe, their scorn, and their laughing-stock … that imbecile, inconsistent thing called Protestantism.”3 In Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (1837), Newman criticized evangelical ecclesiology and the Protestant assertion of the right of private judgment. In Lectures on Justification (1838), he dissected the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith without recourse to the sacraments. In Tract 85 (1838), entitled Lectures on the Scripture Proof of the Doctrines of the Church, he attacked the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. In various British Critic articles and in The Church of the Fathers (1840), Newman pilloried and denigrated the social manifestations of evangelical religion. Taken as a whole, this vast outpouring of social, religious, and theological polemic constituted the most destructively probing Victorian critique of evangelicalism from a religious rather than secular standpoint. Contemporaneously with this challenge to evangelical religion, Newman in a vast leap of the imagination for an English Protestant came to believe that English Reformers had led the English Church to abandon various medieval devotional practices that it need not have abandoned. In their pursuit of their own self-styled “Catholicism,” Newman and his more radical Tractarians companions sought to reclaim for their own elements of pre-Reformation Catholic worship, theology, prayers, and monastic life that most of their Victorian contemporaries, including more moderate high churchmen, regarded as “papist” or “Romanish” corruptions. Newman, somewhat casually at the time and more explicitly years later, described himself as seeking to forge a Via Media, lying between what he regarded as the irrationality of contemporary evangelical or popular Protestantism and the corruptions of contemporary Roman Catholicism. Had he been successful, he would have secured within the Church of England a tolerated position for selfstyled Catholic-minded persons that resembled the position long secured for people of evangelical opinion. By 1845 Newman’s effort collapsed, but while he pursued it, his thought and tactics embraced a broad range of arguments and

122

FRANK M. TURNER

positions designed to create skepticism about religious outlooks alternative to his own. He used these arguments to delegitimize both contemporary Protestantism and Roman Catholicism so as to present his own views and those of his Tractarian colleagues as the legitimate alternative. Relatively late in his Roman Catholic years (after the success of his Apologia), Newman reprinted many of his Anglican works, in some cases with different or modified titles.4 In those works he had frequently used the term “Catholic” or related cognates to represent a church or ecclesiastical authority, which he could never specifically locate, that had the theoretical authority to determine faith and practice. When his Anglican writings appeared in his Roman Catholic years, he easily elided his previous use of “Catholic” to represent Roman Catholicism. Such was not the meaning or intention of these publications when originally published. When these works appeared in the Roman Catholic context, the skepticism inherent in their original publication appeared to disappear, with final authority being assigned to the Roman Catholic Church. However, as will be seen, even as a Roman Catholic Newman never fully satisfied himself as to the exact seat of ecclesiastical authority within that institution, so the skeptical outlook remained. Skepticism functioned instrumentally for the Anglican Newman in a fashion that foreshadowed late Victorian secular skeptics. During the second half of the nineteenth century, scientists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, and philosophical men of letters, such as Leslie Stephen, enunciated an epistemological position denoted by the term “agnosticism.”5 Contending that there existed insufficient evidence to affirm theism or atheism, agnostics explicitly rejected the authority of Hebrew and Christian Scripture, the long British heritage of natural religion, and the influence of clerical culture. The agnostics pressed their skeptical agenda so that they might establish a framework for faith in the methods, theories, and discoveries of mid-Victorian science and the concepts of scientific naturalism. Just as Huxley and company used a body of arguments associated with agnosticism to create space in Victorian Protestant culture for science, Newman between 1833 and 1845 used similar arguments to create space within the Church of England for his own self-constructed Catholic faith and devotion. Like the later agnostics, Newman also directed his criticism toward biblical authority, Roman Catholicism, and natural theology.

Skepticism and Scripture Newman’s most powerful assault on the adequacy of Scripture occurred in late September 1838. Tract 85, Lectures on the Scripture Proof of the Doctrines of the Church (reprinted in 1871 in Discussions and Arguments), constituted the harshest attack against the religious and historical authority of the Scriptures written by any Church of England author in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

NEWMAN

123

The tract originated in Newman’s impatience with evangelical charges that the Tractarian view of the English Church embracing apostolical succession and the efficacy of the sacraments lacked a biblical foundation. Adopting what he admitted to be “a kill-or-cure remedy,”6 Newman argued that if those who appealed to “the want of adequate Scripture evidence for the Church doctrine” were to be consistent, “They ought, on their own principles, to doubt or disown much which happily they do not doubt or disown.”7 Newman defended Church or Catholic doctrines – he used the terms interchangeably in the tract – by claiming that to attack such doctrines with consistency, one must simultaneously undermine Scripture itself. He proposed to demonstrate that “the Canon of Scripture” rested on the foundation of Catholic doctrine and “that those who dispute the latter should, if they were consistent … dispute the former” and “that in both cases we believe, mainly, because the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries unanimously believed.”8 The Church of those centuries had established the canon and the testimony of that Church had established the basis for later clarification of doctrines. If one believed that the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries was corrupt in its understanding of doctrines and rites (as most evangelicals did), it must also have been corrupt in its establishing of the canon. It was consequently necessary to defend Catholic doctrines, which were “the first object of attack”; otherwise, “we should at this very time be defending our belief in the Canon.”9 Evangelical arguments against the Church system could also be turned against various core doctrines held at one time or another by virtually all Christians. For example, there was no Scriptural warrant for infant baptism, for keeping the first day of the week instead of the seventh, for going to church, for having established religions, for permitting the civil magistrate to take lives, or for prohibiting polygamy. Nor, for that matter, did the Bible resolve for the reader its own internal tensions, as for example when the Epistles of St. Paul and St. James appeared to differ on justification and works. Moreover, Newman darkly reminded his readers, “If the words Altar, Absolution, or Succession, are not in Scripture (supposing it), neither is the word Trinity.”10 The conclusions toward which Newman headed was that Scripture requires the comment of Catholic Antiquity, which if rejected leads necessarily to virtual skepticism regarding the meaning of Scripture. The kind of questions Protestants posed to the Tractarian understanding of Catholic doctrines could just as well be posed to them regarding their claims to the sufficiency of the Bible for all knowledge necessary to salvation, the inspiration of the New Testament, justification by faith alone, the doctrine of election, the right to leave the Church over disagreements with the clergy, and self-ordination. Protestants could not consistently admit some doctrines and rule out others. Pressing the necessity of a dogmatic system or authority external to Scripture, Newman urged that without such a system no antecedent reason existed to believe the Bible to be inspired. The Bible was not a single book but a collection of separate compositions written in “as free and unconstrained a manner, and

124

FRANK M. TURNER

(apparently) with as little consciousness of a supernatural dictation or restraint, on the part of His earthly instruments, as if He had no share in the work.”11 Then, in a passage that stunningly foreshadowed Benjamin Jowett’s contribution to the theologically and biblically liberal Essays and Reviews a generation later, Newman observed of the Bible, Whatever else is true about it, this is true, – that we may speak of the history or mode of its composition, as truly as of that of other books; we may speak of its writers having an object in view, being influenced by circumstances, being anxious, taking pains, purposely omitting or introducing things, leaving things incomplete, or supplying what others had so left. Though the Bible be inspired, it has all such characteristics as might attach to a book uninspired, – the characteristics of dialect and style, the distinct effects of times and places, youth and age, of moral and intellectual character.12

The most natural reading of the Bible would not assume it to contain all necessary revelation. Indeed, Newman declared, “It is … far from being a self-evident truth that Scripture must contain all the revealed counsel of GOD; rather the probability lies the other way at first sight.”13 Only the habitual reading of the Bible and the spirit of reverence with which it was approached prevented those readers from regarding much of its contents “as fanciful and extravagant.”14 Those who would critically examine the Church, the Creed, or Scripture must understand that their thought was headed toward the destruction of “Church, Creed, Bible altogether, – which obliterates the very Name of CHRIST from the world.”15 Those who now stood prepared to give up the authority of the Church Catholic would soon find themselves compelled to give up the Scripture. Viewing the contemporary age as moving steadily in this direction, Newman predicted, “The view henceforth is to be, that Christianity does not exist in documents, any more than in institutions; in other words, the Bible will be given up as well as the Church.”16 Newman’s analysis in Tract 85 and in the subsequent republication of the tract left the reader with no grounds for confidence in Scripture outside the authority of the church which declared the inspiration of Scripture. Newman’s analysis in other venues raised serious questions about his real confidence in locating such a church or the seat of authority in such a church.

Ecclesiastical Perfection A second element also leading toward skepticism that marked Newman’s religious thought from the 1830s onward was a tendency toward ecclesiastical perfectionism. Newman was deeply troubled as to where the true church existed in this life. By the late 1820s he eschewed the evangelical concept of an invisible church of the saved saints, but he also found difficulty in locating the true church in any contemporary visible ecclesiastical institution. During the 1830s he

NEWMAN

125

began developing his own image of a Church Catholic that had made its way through the ages—a church that he distinguished from Protestantism and from contemporary Roman Catholicism. During his last fifteen years in the Church of England, Newman firmly rejected Protestantism as a legitimate mode of Christianity. As he would write in 1845, “Whatever be historical Christianity, it is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.”17 His Anglican outlook toward Roman Catholicism was more complicated. As he pursued his own vision of the Church Catholic, Newman, still determined to remain in the Church of England, found it necessary to distinguish his position from that of contemporary Roman Catholicism. To that end he made numerous anti–Roman Catholic statements that he later repudiated. The most important and extensive of these occurred in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837). Although the preponderance of this book attacked evangelical Protestantism, Newman also included a broad discussion of the religious inadequacy of the Roman Catholic Church that served to delegitimize Roman Catholicism in order to make his via media of his own Church Catholic plausible. According to Newman the relation of Roman Catholicism to true Catholicism was not “the absence of right principle” or the presence of errors but rather “perversions, distortions, or excesses” of truth that implied “misdirection and abuse.”18 Denouncing the Roman Church more in grief than in anger, Newman wrote, We must deal with her as we would towards a friend who is visited by derangement; in great affliction, with all affectionate tender thoughts, with tearful regret and a broken heart, but still with a steady eye and a firm hand. For in truth she is a Church beside herself, abounding in noble gifts and rightful titles, but unable to use them religiously; crafty, obstinate, wilful, malicious, cruel, unnatural, as madmen are. Or rather, she may be said to resemble a demoniac; possessed with principles, thoughts, and tendencies, not her own, in outward form and in outward powers what God made her, but ruled within by an inexorable spirit, who is sovereign in his management over her, and most subtle and most successful in the use of her gifts. Thus she is her real self only in name, and, till God vouchsafe to restore her, we must treat her as if she were that evil one which governs her.19

Through this language of regret and sadness over one lost to disease, madness, or demonic possession, Newman distanced himself from the contemporary Roman Catholic Church while embracing a hidden, undistorted ancient Catholic essence somehow residing under the external excrescence of popish corruption.20 At moments over the next several years, Newman and his closest associates entertained the fantasy that through their own pursuit of the Catholic they might liberate a true Catholicism within the confines of the Roman Church while restoring it in the Church of England. Although Tractarians gave Newman’s Prophetical Office the title Against Romanism, what struck most contemporaries about Newman’s Catholic religious experiment was not his occasional, fierce anti-Roman statements, but his drive toward an expansive, experimental devotional life through his articulation of

126

FRANK M. TURNER

what he termed a “prophetical tradition” that extended beyond the formal Episcopal tradition grounded in the Bible and the creeds and handed down over the centuries from bishop to bishop. This largely indeterminate prophetical tradition constituted a vast system, not to be comprised in a few sentences, not to be embodied in one code or treatise, but consisting of a certain body of Truth, permeating the Church like an atmosphere, irregular in its shape from its very profusion and exuberance; at times separable only in idea from Episcopal Tradition, yet at times melting away into legend and fable; partly written, partly unwritten, partly the interpretation, partly the supplement of Scripture, partly preserved in intellectual expressions, partly latent in the spirit and temper of Christians; poured to and fro in closets and upon the housetops, in liturgies, in controversial works, in obscure fragments, in sermons.21

Preserved in the writings of the Church Fathers and other documents, legends, and stories of the Christian Church, this eclectic, ill-defined, and non-dogmatic tradition constituted for Newman and other Tractarians a vast storehouse of Christian practices that might enliven and enrich the faith, devotion, and liturgy of the early nineteenth-century Church of England. The Prophetical Tradition offended evangelicals because of its lack of a scriptural foundation and high churchmen because of its extending beyond their boundaries of antiquity, which ended around the fourth century. The immediate ecclesiastical problem for Newman was the anxiety among his clerical followers that they could not honestly subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England without at the same time rejecting their newly emerging Catholic convictions. To assuage their concerns, Newman in early 1841 published Tract 90, entitled Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles. In this momentous pamphlet that marked the turning point in his career in the Church of England, Newman, as he later stated in the Apologia, sought “to ascertain what was the limit of that elasticity [of the Articles] in the direction of Roman dogma,” “to institute an inquiry how far, in critical fairness, the text could be opened,” and to ascertain “what a man who subscribed it might hold than what he must”22 (80). This essay cannot survey the vast controversy that Tract 90 generated.23 The Oxford Heads of Houses condemned it. The Archbishop of Canterbury demanded the cessation of Tracts for the Times. During the next two years Newman’s argument and personal honesty stood condemned by almost all the English and many of the Irish bishops as well as by commentators in both the religious and secular press. Despite this vast criticism, Newman clung to the position that technically Tract 90 had not received condemnation by any formal ecclesiastical authority and, most important, not by his own diocesan bishop. Newman contended that what had not been formally condemned remained permissible. By the summer of 1845, through a complicated series of events in Oxford and the Court of Arches

NEWMAN

127

in London, which the author has described in detail elsewhere, Newman’s principles in Tract 90 did receive formal condemnation. At that point, his Littlemore followers recognized they could not remain in the Church of England, refused to entertain the notion of constituting their own church, and began to be received in the Roman Catholic Church. (Littlemore was the monastic retreat house he had organized outside Oxford.) Newman followed them on October 9, 1845, without ever having received any formal instruction in Roman Catholicism. Between the publication of Tract 90 and his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, Newman had undertaken what may be termed a prophetic Catholic ministry. In sermons and letters of the time as well as in the Apologia, he described his religious role at Littlemore as resembling that of the prophet Elijah, who, having overturned the idols, still did not worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. Newman and his followers regarded themselves as an enclave or gathered conventicle of the Church Catholic waiting for either the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church to undertake a program of reform. During these months Newman understood that if he were to establish his own Catholic position within the Church of England, he must convince high churchmen that Christian doctrine and devotion had changed after the fourth century and that those changes did not constitute “Romanish” corruptions but legitimate developments of the faith.24 To that end, Newman undertook the composition of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. This remarkable book occupies a key place in Victorian discussions of changing religious belief and displays the lack of secure cultural boundaries so characteristic of that considerable literature. In 1841 Newman had described to Richard Church certain people who if the Church of England “committed herself to heresy, sooner than think that there was no Church any where, would believe the Roman to be the Church – and therefore would on faith accept what they could not otherwise acquiesce in.”25 That was why Newman had to interpret as legitimate developments those changes in Christian faith and practice that Protestants (including high churchmen) regarded as illicit corruptions. He employed the concept of development to provide a reason for himself to acquiesce in such faith and practice and thus to avoid the ecclesiastically skeptical conclusion “that there was no Church any where.” In this respect, the problem for Newman and others of the 1840s was not skepticism about existential religious truth or the historical and scientific accuracy of the Bible associated with late Victorian agnosticism, but rather skepticism about the spiritual and theological adequacy of ecclesiastical institutions. The latter doubt could prove just as corrosive to a person’s religious life and commitment as the former. Newman wrote the essay on development, which had been largely composed before his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, but published in late 1845 subsequent to that event, to explain to high churchmen how new devotional practices and doctrines subsequent to the fourth century had legitimately arisen and might be incorporated into the devotional life and practice of the English Church. But because of the date of publication and late additions Newman made

128

FRANK M. TURNER

to the text, the book was received as an explanation of Newman’s move to Rome. Roman Catholics generally ignored the book and high church Anglicans found its arguments wanting. Both Anglican and Roman Catholic reviewers clearly grasped that the book had been conceived with a purpose quite different from that ascribed to it upon publication. They also saw the book as permeated by a skeptical turn of mind. Throughout his writings, commencing with The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), Newman had presented Christianity as a historical entity changing or evolving rather indeterminately over time. The concept of “Prophetic Tradition” formalized this view, which Newman also voiced in both journal articles and sermons. Refusing to privilege Scripture or antiquity as sources of information about Christianity, Newman in 1845 declared instead that “the history of eighteen hundred years” itself constituted “our most natural informant concerning the doctrine and worship of Christianity.”26 Christianity was what Christians – or, more precisely, what those Christians calling themselves Catholics – had done in a religiously progressive march through the ages. The process of the development of Christian faith and practice throughout human history displaced an original deposit of faith articulated among the Apostles and Fathers as the source of knowledge about the content and character of the Christian religion. There existed no original deposit of faith to be corrupted, but rather a religion originating with the apostles to be fulfilled and realized. Because the human mind could achieve “the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas” only over time and because human beings could not comprehend all at once the “highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers,” those ideas had “required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation,” thus resulting in a progressive development of doctrine over time.27 Christianity for Newman was an idea, but not an idea of the disembodied Platonic sort to be grasped through refined intellection. Rather, Christianity understood historically resembled more nearly an Aristotelian form that must realize itself only through a material embodiment, in this case in the embodied material life of human beings in human society. Christianity was what Christianity had become and presumably was becoming. From the Anglican standpoint, Newman’s argument rejected both the fundamental Protestant position that the original Christian faith resided in Scripture and the high church position that it resided in Scripture as interpreted in antiquity. Reviewers associated with both parties as well as Roman Catholic and English Nonconformist reviewers saw Newman’s position as inherently skeptical, presenting a vision of Christianity that had no certain beginning or final end but rather a religion in an eternal process or flux. As a writer in the high-church English Review observed, while composing the book Newman “was living and acting neither under the authority of his own Church, nor under that of Rome, but under an authority within his own heart; which after all was a self-indulged bias, working to realize a self-invented and ideal model.”28 Orestes Brownson, the recent American convert to Roman Catholicism, saw Newman at one with New England

NEWMAN

129

Unitarians in assuming the idea of Christianity to have been “thrown upon the great concourse of men, to be developed and embodied by the action of their minds, stimulated and directed by it,” and then believing they might use such knowledge abstracted from that history of development to organize “a new institution, a new church, in advance of the old by all the developments which these eighteen hundred years have effected.”29 Brownson also thought the book suggested that Newman had sought to organize his own church. Although admitting that Newman stopped just short of the infidel conclusion that “the [Christian] Religion itself has no fixed Eternal Reality at all,” W. J. Irons, another Anglican reviewer, nonetheless argued, “This system of development, in attempting to enlarge, really invades and destroys Objective Truth.”30 Newman saved his vision of a Christian faith in the process of development from utter skepticism in 1845 only by his appeal to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Contemporary reviewers, however, saw those passages as late interpolations that served Newman well upon entering his new communion. They were not seen as core to his fundamental argument. None of Newman’s Anglican books republished in his Roman Catholic years underwent so extensive revision as his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Also no other work throughout his life was so associated with actual or implicit skepticism.31 Newman’s envisioning an indeterminate trajectory for the development and espousal of Christian doctrine came to the fore within his later Roman Catholic context, producing results equally disastrous as those following Tract 90. Toward the close of the 1850s, Newman became deeply involved with a group of liberal Roman Catholics. In 1859 their major journal the Rambler, which he himself briefly edited, published his article “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” In that highly controversial article, Newman reverted to an expansive understanding of doctrinal development occurring beyond the boundaries of established ecclesiastical authority that very much resembled his previous view of a Prophetic Tradition. In this Rambler essay he stated, I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church in its various constituents and functions per modum unius, manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that one of these channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect; granting at the same time fully, that the gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion of that tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia docens.32

Just as in Tract 90, where Newman had claimed his own right to interpret Anglican doctrine differently than the episcopate, he here attempted to create space for liberal Roman Catholics to pursue their intellectual and theological lives beyond the range of existing ecclesiastical authorities.

130

FRANK M. TURNER

As John Coulson commented, Newman’s publication of “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” constituted “an act of political suicide from which his career within the Church was never fully to recover; at one stroke, he, whose reputation as the one honest broker between the extremes of English catholic opinion had hitherto stood untarnished, gained the Pope’s personal displeasure, the reputation at Rome of being the most dangerous man in England, and a formal accusation of heresy preferred against him by the Bishop of Newport.”33 After much tension and misunderstandings between Newman and various Roman Catholic authorities, he agreed not to reprint the article in his lifetime. Although Newman would repeatedly indicate his compliance with the authority of the papacy, ultramontanes, especially in England, were never certain of him. In 1864 Newman brilliantly seized upon the occasions of Charles Kingsley’s attack on his integrity to defend his honesty and that of English Roman Catholics in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. There as well as in other of his subsequent publications, Newman made a powerful case for the necessity of an authoritative church, which he identified with the Roman Catholic Church, but he was very careful not to set that authority directly in the papacy or in the papacy of a particular moment. Newman would in subsequent years move closer to acknowledging papal authority, but it was at best a grudging or, as Cardinal Avery Dulles has noted, a minimal acknowledgment and one open to various interpretations.34 As an Anglican in the months after the publication of Tract 90, he had hoped to be left alone with his friends at Littlemore under the authority of a friendly bishop of Oxford; to pursue his Catholic experiment; and as a Roman Catholic he hoped to be left alone at the Birmingham Oratory under the authority of a friendly bishop of Birmingham to pursue his own understanding of Roman Catholicism. As both an Anglican and Roman Catholic, Newman wrote of an authoritative church, but within that church he could not locate the actual point of unchanging authority. The ecclesiastical skepticism inherent in his position continued across the decades. H. D. Weidner has brought all these evolving positions from Newman’s Anglican years through to the close of his Roman Catholic authorship under the umbrella of a “Search for a Reformed Catholicism.”35 Weidner may have written even more wisely than he realized. At some point in the late 1820s, Newman became fascinated with the idea of a Catholic Church whose origins predated the Reformation and that had developed since the age of the Apostles. By the end of the 1830s he imagined that he might have such a vision at hand and one to which he and his followers might beckon both the English Church and the Roman Church, if only these great institutions would reform themselves by his lights. In late 1840 Newman admitted to his brother Francis that he had been accused of making “a church half visible, half invisible” and confessed that despite “whatever ridicule attaches to it, that it is like a building seen through a mist.” That mist was the haze of the historical experience of the emergence of Christian doctrine. Through external and internal causes, the doctrines of “Apostolic Christianity” that stood clearly

NEWMAN

131

delineated only by the fourth century had, according to Newman, undergone further development entailing “the more accurate statement and the varied application of ideas from the action of the reason upon them according to new circumstances.” Although vast areas of dispute existed over specifically what had occurred to doctrine between the Apostolic age and the present, Newman broadly asserted to his brother, “No one seems to deny that from the first the mass of Christianity tended straight to what is afterwards known as Catholicism, and was such, as far as it went.” He then explained, “Here then we have one religion in all ages; I profess it. I sacrifice my private judgment to it whenever it speaks; I use my private judgment only in accidental details, where it does not speak, or to determine what it speaks.”36 In 1840 Newman simply could not locate the concrete contemporary manifestation of that church. Even as Newman moved toward Roman Catholicism, the uncertainly of his vision continued. On December 29, 1844, he declared to John Keble, “No one can have a more unfavorable view than I of the present state of the Roman Catholics – so much so, that any who join them would be like the Cistercians of Fountains, living under trees till their house was built.”37 Keble, himself deeply sensitive to Newman’s ecclesiastical skepticism, had asked him earlier that same year, “Do you not think it possible … that the whole Church may be so lowered by sin as to hinder one’s finding on earth anything which seems really to answer to the Church of the Saints? and will it not be well to prepare yourself for disappointment, lest you fall into something like scepticism?”38 Within a year Newman did join the Roman Catholic Church, but there always existed a restlessness in his relationship to that institution, especially as it changed so rapidly during his years therein and as he confronted one difficulty after another with its bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities. Newman’s perfectionist ecclesiology haunted him all his days as he continued to wait for the Roman Catholic Church to live up to his expectations and highest aspirations, never certain that it would or perhaps even could. His true church always remained a vision in the mist.

The Critique of Natural Theology Natural theology from the age of Newton through the mid-nineteenth century played a major role in British religious thought. Writers such as John Ray, William Paley, and the authors of the early Victorian Bridgewater treatises had contended that the observation of nature could lead to the belief in a God that had created a beneficent order. As well as establishing a theological framework supplementing the revealed religion of scripture, British natural theology explicitly upheld a conservative social philosophy while implicitly championing economic development.39 Historians have generally seen this framework of natural theology collapsing under the assault of Lyellian geology, Darwinian evolution, and scientific naturalism between about 1840 and 1880. Newman in a parallel fashion during the very same years provided a

132

FRANK M. TURNER

powerful religious critique of natural theology that from a moral standpoint proved every bit as devastating as that of the advanced scientists. Newman appears never to have been convinced of the validity of natural theology. Indeed, he believed that the study of nature without a previously attained religious outlook on the part of the investigator would possibly inevitably lead to atheism, a view that he voiced on numerous occasions. Although Newman questioned the adequacy of natural theology from the late 1820s, he most fully explored the issue in letters of early 1841 to the Times, which under the title “The Tamworth Reading Room” he reprinted as a Roman Catholic. There he contended that religion could not emerge from science because science, functioning as deductions from empirical investigation, necessarily eschewed religion. Newman declared, “Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences.”40 If science and religion were to have any relationship, it must be that of religious faith hallowing science. Those principles of natural theology, which scientists and natural theologians understood as deductions from their observations, were actually interpretations originating elsewhere than from their observations. It was those prior presuppositions, not the findings of science as science, that hallowed the work of the contemporary scientific endeavor. Newman further contended that what many contemporaries regarded as religion based upon knowledge of nature was not actually a real religion because “no Religion has yet been a Religion of physics or of philosophy. It has ever been synonymous with Revelation. It never has been a deduction from what we know: it has ever been an assertion of what we are to believe. It has never lived in a conclusion; it has never been a message, or a history, or a vision.”41 Natural theology shared one of the faults of emotional evangelical religion; it was based upon a sense of subjective feeling, in this case awe or wonder over the natural order. It was not that Newman thought nature lacking in wonder, but, as he explained, “The material world, indeed, is infinitely more wonderful than any human contrivance; but wonder is not religion, or we should be worshipping our railroads.”42 Newman found in nature no evidence of God or a Moral Governor. Even if science could on its own devices provide evidence of a Moral Governor, it could do nothing to teach “divine holiness, truth, justice, or mercy.”43 Nature observed without religious presuppositions, like the Bible read without religious presuppositions, did not for Newman bespeak the presence of God. Over a decade later, in the Idea of a University, Newman again argued that natural theology, which he there termed “physical theology,” rested upon a subjective response to nature that could provide no substitute for genuine theology.44 If God amounted to no more than what the telescope or the microscope or a noninstrumental contemplation of the natural order could reveal, then “divine truth is not something separate from Nature, but it is Nature with a divine glow upon it.”45 If such were the case, natural theology constituted “a most jejune study, considered as a science, and really is no science at all, for it is ordinarily nothing more than a series of pious or polemical remarks upon the physical world viewed religiously, whereas the word ‘Natural’ properly comprehends man and society,

NEWMAN

133

and all that is involved therein.”46 The God of natural theology was not the sovereign and eternal creator, lord, governor, and upholder of the world. Newman understood natural theology to constitute one of the numerous contemporary theodicies which, based in analyses of nature or history, attempted to justify the suffering of the world. In the Apologia, Newman explained that his faith in the existence of God arose from the voice of his own conscience rather than from any evidence gleaned from examining society or nature or history. He then continued, If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator…. Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world. I am speaking for myself only; and I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society and the course of history, but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice.47

Newman reasserted this position in the Grammar of Assent of 1870,where in a remarkably dark passage describing the experience of a person looking for the presence of the Creator in the creation, he wrote, “What strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully is, His absence (if I may so speak) from His own world. It is a silence that speaks. It is as if others had got possession of His work.”48 Newman’s emotional and theological outlook led him to a view of the world as restless, formless, and tumultuous as that of any radically materialistic evolutionist and much less purposeful than that of a Herbert Spencer. Newman’s critique of natural theology because of its having been so embedded into arguments for contemporary material progress was part and parcel of his denial of modern civilization as having any capacity to address the deepest needs of the human situation and of human sinfulness. He understood that Protestant advocates of natural theology associated it with a defense of contemporary material progress. He also saw Roman Catholics eager to benefit from new granted civic equality as similarly drawn into the materialism of the age. As early as 1832, in a sermon entitled “The Religion of the Day,” Newman castigated evangelical Christians who pointed to advances in material civilization as indications of their living in the last days before Christ’s return. Over two decades later, writing in a similar vein, he told Irish Roman Catholic laymen hoping to see their sons advance socially by receiving a liberal education, Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated

134

FRANK M. TURNER

intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life … but … they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless, – pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them…. Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.49

Many years later, in the Grammar of Assent, Newman deplored “the religion of so-called civilization” because “civilization itself is not a development of man’s whole nature, but mainly of the intellect, recognizing indeed the moral sense, but ignoring the conscience,” and “consequently the religion in which it issues has no sympathy either with the hopes and fears of the awakened soul, or with those frightful presentiments which are expressed in the worship and traditions of the heathen.”50 With powerful cultural insight, Newman grasped that the realm of material civilization and secular intellect constituted a self-sufficient parallel universe to that of what he regarded as genuine religion. Newman’s critique of natural theology, like his critique of the adequacy of Scripture and his ecclesiastical perfectionism, constituted still another strain of skepticism in his general mental and religious outlook. However, because natural theology was so deeply intermeshed with contemporary cultural confidence and a progressive interpretation of modern British society, Newman’s assault on both its validity and adequacy transformed him into a cultural apostate as well as religious critic. It is Newman’s cultural criticism rooted in religious conscience that more than anything else gives his thought relevance for the twenty-first century. Newman as both an Anglican and a Roman Catholic understood that genuine religion must stand in sharp tension with the surrounding culture and must demonstrate the incommensurability of that culture to the deepest needs of the human condition. Otherwise, the counterattractions of modern material life would inevitably displace religion. For Newman, religion in human history had originated prior to revelation. Initially Natural Religion manifest in the conscience deeply impressed one with the sense of sin that required redemption and thus created “the anticipation … that a Revelation will be given.”51 Newman explained in the Grammar as he had in other writings, “I assume the presence of God in our conscience, and the universal experience, as keen as our experience of bodily pain, of what we call a sense of sin or guilt.”52 Newman thought that human beings could not be convinced of the truth of Christianity without that prior disposition aroused by the demands of conscience. The call to obedience as a response to the demands of conscience had marked Newman’s thought from his earliest days in the pulpit of St. Mary’s and transcended all his ecclesiastical polemics and allegiances. No other single factor so deeply characterized his intellectual and theological life across the decades. As he explained in a long passage from the Grammar of Assent that deserves full quotation,

NEWMAN

135

I do not address myself to those, who in moral evil and physical see nothing more than imperfections of a parallel nature; who consider that the difference in gravity between the two is one of degree only, not of kind; that moral evil is merely the offspring of physical, and that as we remove the latter so we inevitably remove the former; that there is a progress of the human race which tends to the annihilation of moral evil; that knowledge is virtue, and vice is ignorance; that sin is a bugbear, not a reality; that the Creator does not punish except in the sense of correcting; that vengeance in Him would of necessity be vindictiveness; that all that we know of Him, be it much or little, is through the laws of nature; that miracles are impossible; that prayer to Him is a superstition; that the fear of Him is unmanly; that sorrow for sin is slavish and abject; that the only intelligible worship of Him is to act well our part in the world, and the only sensible repentance to do better in future; that if we do our duties in this life, we may take our chance for the next; and that it is of no use perplexing our minds about the future state, for it is all a matter of guess. These opinions characterize a civilized age; and if I say that I will not argue about Christianity with men who hold them, I do so, not as claiming any right to be impatient or peremptory with any one, but because it is plainly absurd to attempt to prove a second proposition to those who do not admit the first. I assume then that the above system of opinion is simply false, inasmuch as it contradicts the primary teachings of nature in the human race, wherever a religion is found and its workings can be ascertained.53

In perhaps no passage of his voluminous writings did Newman so clearly state the one religious truth about which he entertained no skepticism. Overwhelmed by the internal demands of conscience and the inability of human beings unaided by God to meet those demands, Newman explained, “Natural Religion is based upon the sense of sin; it recognizes the disease, but it cannot find, it does not lookout for the remedy. That remedy, both for guilt and moral impotence, is found in the central doctrine of Revelation, the Mediation of Christ.”54 In this respect, Newman’s cultural apostasy that denied the adequacy of human culture to respond to the needs of the human situation as roused and informed by conscience led back to a faith in revelation and the necessity of revelation. But in his other writings, he had raised deeply skeptical questions surrounding the capacity of either Scripture or any contemporary ecclesiastical institutions or nature to mediate that revelation.

Notes 1 Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1801–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2 See Frank M. Turner, “The Newman of the Apologia and the Newman of History,” in John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 54–76. 3 John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered: In Twelve Lectures Addressed in 1850 to the Party of the Religious Movement of 1833 (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), 145.

136

FRANK M. TURNER

4 Prior to the publication of the Apologia, Newman’s Anglican works after his conversion were difficult to locate. One of the reasons he published them late in life was to generate income for the Birmingham Orator. 5 Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 6 Newman, Tract 85:3, in Tracts for the Times by Members of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, new ed. (London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1840). Newman republished this tract with some minor verbal changes in John Henry Newman, Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1872), 109–253. 7 Newman, Tract 85:3. 8 Newman, Tract 85:102. 9 Newman, Tract 85:102. 10 Newman, Tract 85:11. 11 Newman, Tract 85:30. 12 Newman, Tract 85:30. 13 Newman, Tract 85:32. 14 Newman, Tract 85:88. 15 Newman, Tract 85:100. 16 Newman, Tract 85:99. 17 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845), 5. For a contemporary comment on the hostility displayed toward Protestantism in Newman’s Essay as opposed to his attraction to Roman Catholicism, see “Mr. Newman; His Theories and Character,” Fraser’s Magazine, 33 (1845): 253–268. 18 John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1837), 51. 19 Newman, Prophetical Office, 101. 20 “The very force of the word corruption implies this to be the peculiarity of Romanism”; Newman, Prophetical Office, 51. 21 Newman, Prophetical Office, 298. Newman had first formulated this idea in an exchange with a French Roman Catholic priest in 1834. See Louis Allen, ed., John Henry Newman and the Abbé Jager: A Controversy on Scripture and Tradition (1834–1836) (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). Allen’s Introduction is relevant to an understanding of the emergence of Newman’s views on Prophetical Tradition. 22 Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons, 80. 23 Turner, John Henry Newman, 358–389, 528–557. 24 Newman entertained no hope of convincing evangelicals. They believed Christian truths had been established in the apostolic age and that corruption had set in shortly thereafter. Newman’s audience were the high churchmen, who, unlike the evangelicals, looked to tradition as well as Scripture. Newman differed from the high churchmen in the time frame in which he imagined doctrine and devotion developing over the centuries. 25 John Henry Newman to R. W. Church, December 24, 1841, in Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–2006), 8:383. (Hereafter cited as L&D.)

NEWMAN

26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

137

Newman, Development, 27. Newman, Development, 27. “Newman’s Essay on Development,” English Review, 4 (1845): 391. [O. Brownson], “Newman’s Theory of Christian Doctrine,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review 3 (1846): 355–356. William J. Irons, The Theory of Development Examined, with Reference Specially to Mr. Newman’s Essay, and to the Rule of St. Vincent of Lerins (London: Francis and John Rivington, 1846), 58–59. In reference to Newman’s edition of his volume on development as published in 1878, Charles Frederick Harrold wrote, “No other work of Newman’s underwent so much revision as did the Essay on Development.” Charles Frederick Harrold, “Preface,” in John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949), vii. In the same edition, consult O. I. Schreiber, “Newman’s Revisions in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” 417–435. John H. Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, ed. John Coulson (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 63. John Coulson, “Introduction,” in Newman, On Consulting the Faithful, 2. Avery Robert Cardinal Dulles, Newman (New York: Continuum, 2002), 86–96; see also John R. Page, What Will Dr. Newman Do? John Henry Newman and Papal Infallibility, 1865–1875 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1994). H. D. Weidner, “Introduction,” in John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), lxxvi. John Henry Newman to Francis W. Newman, November 10, 1840, in L&D, 7:440, 7:440–441, 7:441, 7:442. John Henry Newman to John Keble, December 29, 1844, in L&D, 10:476. John Keble to John Henry Newman, June 12, 1844, in Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others … 1839–1845 (London: Longmans, Greene, 1917), 320. Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101–130. Newman, Discussions and Arguments, 295. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 303. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated in Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin in Occasional Lectures and Essays Addressed to the Members of the Catholic University, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 29. Newman, The Idea of a University, 29. Ibid., 46. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons, 217. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. I. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 255–256 Newman, The Idea of a University, 91. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 255. Ibid., 272.

138

FRANK M. TURNER

52 Ibid., 268. 53 Ibid., 267. 54 Ibid., 313.

Bibliography Aquino, Frederick D. Communities of Informed Judgment: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Barr, Colin. Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845–1865. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Newsome, David. The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning. London: John Murray, 1993. Page, John R. What Will Dr. Newman Do? John Henry Newman and Papal Infallibility, 1865–1875. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994. Strange, Roderick. Newman and the Gospel of Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Thomas, Stephen Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Turner, Frank M. Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Turner, Frank M. John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Turner, Frank M. The Newman of the Apologia and the Newman of History. In John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons, ed. Frank M. Turner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008, 54–76.

PART II

Trends and Movements

7

Natural Science and Theology James C. Livingston

141

8

Romanticism and Pantheism Julia A. Lamm

165

9

Roman Catholic Theology: Tübingen Bradford E. Hinze

187

10

Russian Theology Olga Nesmiyanova

214

11

Evangelicalism David W. Bebbington

235

12

Kenotic Christology David R. Law

251

13

Mediating Anglicanism: Maurice, Gore, and Temple Ulrike Link-Wieczorek

280

14

Mediating Theology in Germany Matthias Gockel

301

15

America: Confessional Theologies James D. Bratt

319

140

PART II: TRENDS AND MOVEMENTS

16

America: Transcendentalism to Social Gospel Robert W. Jenson

339

17

Reformed Theology in Scotland and the Netherlands Graham McFarlane

358

18

Neo-Scholasticism Ralph Del Colle

375

19

The Bible and Literary Interpretation Stephen Prickett

395

20

Skeptics and Anti-Theologians George Pattison

412

21

History of Religion School Mark D. Chapman

434

22

The Bible and Theology John W. Rogerson

455

23

Liberal Theology in Germany Christine Axt-Piscalar

468

24

Catholic Modernism Gerard Loughlin

486

CHAPTER 7

Natural Science and Theology James C. Livingston

In this chapter we explore the various ways in which nineteenth-century theologians responded to quite extraordinary advances in the sciences and to their theological and larger cultural significance. These sciences included not only geology, biology, and physics, but also the new social sciences of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and, most importantly, historical-critical research. At least initially, efforts toward some form of theological reconciliation with science were predominant. This may astonish, since the common belief over the past century is that the nineteenth century ushered in a long war between science and theology. Recent historical work has exposed this portrayal as essentially a legend that does, however, contain a modicum of truth. The notion of a pervasive nineteenth-century conflict between theology and science was due, in large measure, to the popularity and influence of two books that portrayed the relationship between the two parties as a “conflict” or “warfare.” John William Draper (1811–1882), chemistry professor and rationalist, published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1874. Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) – the first president of Cornell University, an intrepid defender of intellectual freedom, and an opponent of sectarianism – published his two-volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896. On inspection, it is evident that Draper’s real target was the institutional Roman Catholic Church; White’s bête noir was “dogmatic theology.” While neither author opposed a theology open to scientific advance, their choice of examples and their militant rhetoric belied the fact, and their books incited a combative polemic on both sides, producing the image of two discordant, contending powers. The scientist T. H. Huxley (1825–1895), who referred to himself as the “Bishop of the church scientific,”1 thus interpreted the situation and its outcome: Whenever science and [religious] orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter have been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not

142

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

annihilated…. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules. 2

It mattered not whether there really was warfare between science and theology; everyone was led to believe that there was.3 The “conflict” model had hypostatized science and theology as two opposed entities. It failed to see them as complex personal and social activities in which, often, the same individual or group participated, rather naturally, in both spheres. On the other hand – and here is the measure of truth in Draper’s and White’s polemic – there were some substantive intellectual disagreements between theology and specific, new scientific hypotheses and claims, as we will see. Writers who picture a harmony between nineteenth-century science and theology are, therefore, as guilty of distortion as were Draper and White. Some historians have suggested that if there was, in fact, a real polarization, it was the intramural conflict among scientists themselves, since most scientists were religious men and numerous clergy before 1870 were scientists. Alvar Ellegård can, with some justification, suggest, “The Darwinian controversy can … be best characterized as one engaging religious science against irreligious science.”4 But the majority of the religious scientists and theologians agreed on one or another form of mediation or reconciliation between the two fields. This was especially true in the extended discussions of natural theology in Britain during most of the century. The militant “irreligious scientists” were, in fact, a rather small but vocal group represented, for example, by Huxley and his associates in the X Club in Britain and by scientists such as Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) in Germany. While a comprehensive chronological account of the theological encounter with science is not feasible here, we can examine a variety of types of theological response, with attention both to notable theologians and to some lesser-known figures who, nonetheless, are highly representative of this nineteenth-century encounter.5 We should keep in mind that the use of a typology serves only a practical, organizational purpose. It does not assume that these forms of engagement and response represent “essential” prototypes, that is, hard and fast alternatives. We will see that a number of the theologians discussed here held varied and conflicting views of the relationship between theology and science over long careers – and they often could hold in tension contrasting, but not irreconcilable, positions at the same time. So, mindful of their limits, these types can help to illuminate the variety of positions taken by nineteenth-century theologians engaged in this historic dialogue. First, we will examine two quite opposed ways of understanding theology’s relation to science. The first acknowledges a real, even intrinsic, linkage of theology and science. The second approach envisions theology and science as incommensurable domains, having nothing to do with one another. The other types that we explore demonstrate theological accommodations to science, or see their complementarity, or attempt to bring theology into some form of mediation and reconciliation with science; whether they are successful or not is, perhaps, moot.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

143

The Integral Coherence of Theology and Science Some recent studies of theology in the nineteenth century give scant attention to natural theology and its changing course, as if the arguments of Hume and Kant had declared it dead. In fact, natural theology and the argument from design prospered, especially in Britain and North America. And the natural theologians perceived a basic coherence between their theology and science. William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) did live on well into the latter decades of the nineteenth century, though repeatedly, and often radically, transformed. Darwin himself found it difficult to shake Paley’s influence. And its legacy runs like a thread through the history of Anglo-American theology from the natural theologies of the Bridgewater Treatises (1833–1836) to Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883). What is significant is that the defenders of natural theology accepted the premise that all truth is one and in harmony, their inference being that science is the friend and handmaiden and, in some cases, the rule and norm of revealed theology. We can look at three theologians who, in different ways, illustrate this type of response. The German theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) illustrates how the authority and sway of science compelled a theologian to disavow revealed theology, in his case Christianity. Strauss was the author of the provocative but influential work The Life of Jesus (1835). The book tested the historical portrayals of Jesus in the New Testament and proposed a thoroughly mythical interpretation of most of these accounts. However, in Strauss’ estimation, this did not disturb the Christian’s faith in the union of God and humanity, which, he believed (with Hegel), was independent of historical criticism. The protests against the young Strauss’s offensive views provoked the government to cancel his appointment as Professor of Dogmatics at Zurich in 1839. Financially secure, Strauss was able to leave academic life and become an independent scholar, free to pursue his theological views. He moved ever closer to pantheism, then to materialism, rejecting belief in a personal God. In his later writings, he measured all theological beliefs by the methods of investigation and the current hypotheses of natural science. He especially seized on Darwin’s doctrine as the true direction for the future, since it had replaced all notions of divine teleology and a superintending providence with the natural processes and laws comprehended by science itself. In his last work, The Old Faith and the New (1872), Strauss declared that the “only choice is between the miracle – the divine hand of the Creator – and Darwin.”6 He had embraced a thoroughly progressive, materialistic monism, that is, a new faith in the promise of science itself. Two theologians also selected to represent this type of response remained within the Christian community. Both, however, thought that natural science should not only serve as theology’s handmaiden but also serve to confirm Christian revelation.

144

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

William Buckland (1784–1856) was an Anglican clergyman, professor of mineralogy and geology at Oxford, author of the Bridgewater Treatise Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (2 vols., 1836), and after 1845 the Dean of Westminster in London. In his massive, richly illustrated Geology and Mineralogy, Buckland sought to prove that the discoveries of science ratify the power and wisdom, hence the goodness, of God as manifested in the Creation. In volume 1, he concludes, The Earth from her deep foundations unites the celestial orbs that roll through boundless space, to declare the glory and show forth the praise of their common Author and Preserver; and the voice of Natural Theology accords harmoniously with the testimonies of Revelation, in ascribing the origin of the Universe to the will of One, eternal, dominant Intelligence … the supreme first cause of all things.7

In his effort to confirm biblical revelation through science, Buckland appealed to some risky evidence, including the claim that geological data supported the Genesis account of a universal Flood, as well as the early appearance of the human race, which claim he later had to withdraw. Buckland saw geology as revealing and confirming God’s providential plan and goodness by storing the earth with those things that later would be necessary for humanity and its needs. He offered the example of the fortunate coal deposits in the newly industrialized midlands of England. Arguments such as these allowed Buckland, and other Bridgewater authors, to defend a theodicy that buttressed a conservative socioeconomic status quo. Such were the often veiled implications of this type of theological response to science.8 The British scientist and popular evangelical theologian Henry Drummond (1851–1897) offers a later example of a theology that presumes the integral coherence of theology and science. Drummond’s understanding of this unity is set out in two books: Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1884), which during the first twenty-five years of publication sold half a million copies; and The Ascent of Man (1894). In his preface to the earlier work, Drummond clarifies his task as demonstrating that the “Laws of the Spiritual World” are identical to the “Laws of the Natural World.” He does this by specifying those natural laws operative in the religious domain. And the key to this exhibit of “Nature in Religion” is what he calls “the Law of Continuity”: The Natural Laws, as the Law of Continuity might well warn us, do not stop with the visible and then give place to a new set of Laws bearing a strong similitude to them. The Laws of the invisible are the same laws, projections of the natural not supernatural. Analogous Phenomena are not the fruit of parallel Laws, but the same Laws – Laws which at one end, as it were, may be dealing with Matter, at the other end with Spirit.9

To Drummond, the great laws of theology simply “are the Laws of Nature in disguise.” Hence, it is the task of theology “to take off the mask and disclose to a waning

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

145

skepticism the naturalness of the supernatural,”10 since “as the Supernatural becomes slowly Natural, will also the Natural become slowly Supernatural.”11 Drummond’s Christian evolutionary eschatology and theodicy are spelled out in The Ascent of Man, where Darwin is embraced only to be transmuted. Drummond sees all living things as exhibiting two functions: nutrition, the basis of the evolutionary “Struggle for Life”; and reproduction, which he associates with the “Struggle for the Life of Others.” The struggle for life can be justified since its “vigorous mood” weeds out the imperfect, without which all progress would be impossible. In Drummond’s theodicy the “Struggle for the Life of Others” is, he believes, winning out over the “Struggle for Life,” and it will eventuate in the coming of the altruistic Kingdom of Love. Drummond does not appear to perceive that his uniting of Darwin’s pure naturalism – a Nature “red in tooth and claw” – with his own quasi-Christian eschatology might, due to their dissonance, perplex his Christian readers.

Theology and Science as Incommensurate Domains The supposition that theology and science are wholly independent spheres was not especially popular in the nineteenth century. Even biblical literalists and sophisticated conservative theologians such as the American Presbyterian Charles Hodge spoke of their “higher unity,” though this unity might appear veiled to present observers. There were, however, some theologians who held that while theology and science do not collide with one another, they are, nonetheless, disparate spheres of knowledge and truth. While there should be no conflict, neither should attempts be made to conjoin them or to explore the ways in which they can be seen to “correspond.” The idea that theology and science are incommensurate domains is exemplified in the writings of the eminent Roman Catholic theologian John Henry Newman. It is also a crucial theme in Protestant Ritschlian theology in Germany in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. As we will see, however, Newman and the German Ritschlians build their arguments on very different foundational principles, even though their conclusions about theology and the sciences are similar. The English Roman Catholic theologian John Henry, Cardinal Newman (1801– 1890), was an influential priest in the Church of England before his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845. In 1879 he was named a Cardinal of the Church by Pope Leo XIII. In a series of lectures on Catholic education, some written as early as 1852, Newman addressed the relationship between Catholic theology and the physical sciences. The lectures later became part of Newman’s famous book The Idea of a University (1873). Newman argues that Catholic theology and science pursue quite different and independent methods of investigation: Induction is the instrument of Physics, and deduction only is the instrument of Theology. There the simple question is, What is revealed? All doctrinal knowledge

146

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

flows from one fountain head. If we are able to enlarge our view and multiply our propositions, it must be merely by the comparison and adjustment of the original truths; if we would solve new questions, it must be by consulting old answers. The notion of doctrinal knowledge absolutely novel … is intolerable to Catholic ears…. The Divine Voice has spoken once for all, and the only question is about its meaning.12

According to Newman, Christian revelation is the singular source of Christian truth, and “the Apostles its sole depository.”13 And problems emerge when the theologian adopts the inductive method that, Newman argues, should be limited to the scientific accumulation of new knowledge of nature but, in the theologian’s hand, is used to judge or to confirm Christian revelation. Newman sees this as the great danger of all natural theology, as well as modern Protestant theology. Both search for “correspondences” between biblical revelation and scientific fact. The God of natural theology, or “physical theology” as Newman calls it, is the God of neither Christian revelation nor Christian theology. In theological investigations as such, “physics must be excluded.” Science and theology must be recognized as different ways of knowing: The theologian speaking of Divine Omnipotence, for the time simply ignores the laws of nature as existing restraints upon its exercize; and the physical philosopher, on the other hand, in his experiments upon natural phenomena, is simply ascertaining those laws, putting aside the question of that Omnipotence.14

Some theologians associated with Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) in Germany also insisted that Christian theology is independent of scientific developments, whether they be in the natural sciences or in the conclusions of scientific historiography. Ritschl taught at Bonn and, after 1864, at Göttingen, where he devoted more of his time to systematic theology. The key to Ritschl’s theology,15 and to his understanding of the relation between theology and science, is located in his theory of “value judgments,” which he derived largely from Immanuel Kant’s doctrine of how the mind receives impressions from the world of phenomena, as this doctrine was modified by the philosopher R. H. Lotze (1817–1881). On the one hand, the mind judges sensations and impressions according to the causal relations in an objective (scientific) system of nature. On the other hand, the mind receives these sensations according to their worth to the individual. The latter is the source of the mind’s knowledge of value. Causal judgments and value judgments work simultaneously; therefore, no form of scientific knowledge is completely disinterested. Since value judgments are determinative in all causal knowledge of the world, Ritschl distinguishes between what he calls “concomitant” and “independent” value judgments. The former are necessary in all theoretical cognition, as in technical observation and operations, while the latter are perceptions of moral ends, their effects and hindrances. Theology has to do with that class of independent value judgments where moral worth is determinative, not

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

147

incidental, for the individual. Theology therefore recognizes the inherent existential involvement of the self in genuine ethical and theological knowledge. Science and theology thus represent, for Ritschl, the distinct domains of “fact” and “value,” of “nature” and “spirit.” It would be quite wrong, however, to speak of the mode of cognition of nature (science) and that of value (religion) as objective and subjective. Both modes of cognition give us real, objective, though quite different, knowledge. Ritschl proceeds to apply these epistemological principles to the Christian doctrine of God as revealed in the historical person of Jesus Christ. God cannot be known abstractly as, for example, in the natural theologian’s cosmological proof of a first cause. For the Christian, God is known only in His worth for us as revealed in the work of Christ – that is, as the guarantor of our victory over nature’s necessity – and as appropriated by faith. For Ritschl, faith is an absolutely necessary condition for any knowledge of God and, therefore, the Christian claim regarding Jesus as the Christ cannot be established by scientific-historical (i.e., neutral) facts – for there are no neutral, disinterested historical facts. A scientific description of the crucifixion can make certain judgments of fact about the person Jesus. But it would be quite misleading to say that such judgments of fact do not include overt or covert judgments of value, for the two forms of judgment operate simultaneously. And, in Ritschl’s view, science exceeds its limits if it claims to give a “truer” judgment of Jesus’ worth. Therefore, Ritschl opposed the nineteenth-century “back to Jesus” movement when it was premised on the doctrines of historical positivism. Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922) was the first influential theologian to declare publicly his support of Ritschl’s program.16 He did so because Ritschl had repudiated theology’s dependence on abstract metaphysics and natural theology and had recognized the dangers in the growing hegemony of scientific naturalism. These concerns united in Herrmann’s appeal to the Kantian critique of metaphysics, in his attack on the pretensions of science, and in his defense of the moral foundation of faith. Herrmann spent most of his career at Marburg – then the center of Neo-Kantian philosophy – and was the teacher of both Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. In two of his works, Metaphysics in Theology (1876) and Religion in Relation to Knowledge of the World and Morality (1879), he developed his argument that science and theology are two independent spheres with entirely different foundations. Science is restricted to the causal relationships between phenomena. Theology answers the moral question of how the world is to be judged if there really is to be a highest Good, that is, God as the guarantor of the meaning and purpose of life. Within its proper limits science is free to hold sway. and, in Herrmann’s judgment, even a mechanistic view of nature’s processes need not be a threat to, or opposed by, theology. Science must be resisted only when it exceeds its bounds and imposes itself on the realm of human meanings and values. The task of Christian theology is, then, to show that the problems encountered in the realm of the human spirit are solved when the individual appropriates what Christianity

148

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

teaches and actively participates in the Christian moral view of the world, namely, that both nature and spirit are under the teleological guidance of a personal, loving God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Christians judge the world of nature not as benignly indifferent to human values and purposes, but rather as filled with moral and spiritual meaning, and see themselves as free agents with a moral vocation and destiny. In Herrmann’s dualism of science (knowledge of facts) and theology (moral freedom and meaning), we see a sophisticated position that is taken up not only by his students Barth and Bultmann, but also more generally by twentiethcentury religious Existentialism. Parenthetically, this is the relationship defended by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), who, in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), proposes a Kantian type of dualism of the independent domains of science and moral judgment by means of a profound critique of language. A significant theological legacy of the Ritschlian, particularly the Herrmannian, dualism of science and religion is the almost complete isolation of theology from the concerns raised by science, as well as a lack of interest in the natural world, during the entire first half of the twentieth century.17

Theological Accommodations to Science In the often zealous effort to accommodate theology to the new developments in science, numerous nineteenth-century theologians and clergy seriously distorted their theology, the science that they were appropriating, or both. One form of accommodation can be seen in the work of Baden Powell (1796–1860), an Anglican priest, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford from 1827 to 1860, a lifelong theological apologist, and contributor of the essay “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity” to the volume Essays and Reviews (1860), a book that sparked one of the most famous theological controversies of the century. Baden Powell also represents, in his long career as a Christian apologist, a variety of responses to the science-theology relationship.18 He was the first prominent Anglican clergyman to express publicly his support of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). Baden Powell began as rather a militant High Church defender of the harmony of the Christian Scriptures with science. He then became a noted defender of natural theology’s rational “evidences” of Christianity, rejecting, however, the Paleyian design argument and insisting on science’s demonstration of a wider, divine teleology. The uniformity of nature had itself become for Powell the only sound precondition for belief in a providential order. In his last years he shifted his position significantly, arguing that science can neither prove nor disprove the truths of theology – the two domains had to do with answering quite different questions. And the truths of Christian theology are based on faith alone.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

149

Our interest here is in Baden Powell’s long defense of Christian theology in The Connection of Natural and Divine Truth (1838). It represents an appeal to what was, for him, the only compelling evidence, namely, that grounded in a radically inductive natural theology. He was correct in his criticism of those who, like William Whewell – author of the third Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology – were injecting into their natural theology a priori assumptions about a Divine creative intention. No, Baden Powell insisted, any proof of God’s existence from nature must be entirely independent of any reference to theological or teleological presumptions. Inferences drawn from the inductive study of nature and its connections, as observed in the work of naturalists such as Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and, later, Darwin, alone are legitimate. Baden Powell was blunt: “The stability of natural theology rests on the demonstration of physical truth; and upon the assurance of the great doctrines of natural theology must all proof, and even all notions of a Revelation be essentially founded.”19 Baden Powell’s critics were, however, quick to remind him that the best that a naturalist’s “physical truth” can come up with is a “cause” of all things – not a deity with the moral attributes of the Christian God, as David Hume had famously pointed out. Baden Powell’s stringent demands on natural theology allowed him to infer no more than a vague evolutionary theism, surely not a sufficient foundation to support “all notions of a Revelation.” His bold effort to build a Christian apologetic on the prior scientific inductions drawn from nature proved shaky. To his credit, he refused to distort science, but his radical accommodation to, and claims for, science left his Christian theology a mere shadow, unrecognized by his theological colleagues. In the years immediately following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, there were numerous theologians who tried to accommodate Christianity to Darwin’s evolution by denying that God’s providence requires direct, periodic creative interventions. Rather, they argued, divine providence can better be seen in the Creator’s original impress of his evolutionary plan on matter, which allows the creation’s development to proceed on its own. This type of response is typified in Frederick Temple’s (1821–1902) Bampton Lectures, preached at Oxford University in 1884. At the time, Temple was Bishop of Exeter. He had preached a conciliatory sermon on “the present relations of science and religion” before the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, the same year that he contributed a chapter to the controversial Essays and Reviews. Temple was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896. The crux of Temple’s 1884 published lectures on The Relations between Religion and Science is his attempt to show that theology is strengthened by Darwinism. In Temple’s view, what is touched by Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine “is not the evidence of design but the mode in which design was executed.”20 In an often cited passage, Temple compares Darwin’s progressionist view with the less satisfactory notion of God’s direct acts of creation. In the

150

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

latter case “the Creator made the animals at once such as they now are,” while in Darwin’s evolutionary view, God impressed on certain particles of matter which, either at the beginning or at some point in the history of His creation He endowed with life, such inherent powers that in the ordinary course of time living creatures such as at present were developed. The creative power remains the same in either case; the design with which that creative power was exercized remains the same. He did not make the things we may say; no, but He made them make themselves. And surely this rather adds than withdraws force from the great argument.21 (Italics added.)

Temple thought it more befitting the Creator that He impressed His will once and for all on the Creation “than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what He had previously made.”22 And he was confident that the foundations of theology were secure because scientific materialism could never explain the two critical theological connections: God’s original creation and the unique reality of the human soul or spirit. However, it appeared to some theologians that the good bishop believed these two supernatural acts to be the sufficient compass of God’s direct commerce with the world. One critic was Aubrey Moore (1848– 1890), Anglican priest, theological tutor at Oxford, and contributor to Lux Mundi (1889), the standard bearer of a new Anglo-Catholic Liberalism. Moore was theologically orthodox and knowledgeable about science. He was Curator of the Botanic Gardens in Oxford and welcomed Darwin’s theory. Moore perceived current theological apologetic as falling into two disastrous errors. One was dualism, which defended a false antithesis between a natural evolution and a supernatural creation of species. Moore argued for an alternative that he called “supernatural evolution” or “natural creation.” He regretted the fact that theological dualists were willing to give the scientists autonomy over the whole territory of nature’s processes, which the scientists were delighted to accept. They were certain, of course, that as scientific knowledge increases its scope, the theologian’s sphere of activity shrinks to inconsequence. The second theological error was to lapse into a sub-Christian deism. This was the theological price paid by Bishop Temple in his commendable but misguided effort to reconcile theology and Darwinism. Moore considered Temple’s comments about God impressing his will “once for all” on His creation, and God’s providing for nature’s variety by “His one original impress,” to be hardly Christian. “It is one thing,” Moore points out, “to speak of God as ‘declaring the end from the beginning,’ it is another to use language which seems to imply … that God withdraws Himself from his Creation and leaves it to evolve itself.”23 Moore thought Darwin had “done good service in overthrowing the dogma of special creations” and the depiction of God as a kind of “absentee landlord.” He regarded Darwin’s theory as infinitely more Christian than the various theories of “Special Creation,” since Darwin’s evolution allowed for a Divine immanence in nature. Any theory of creation that implies occasional Divine interventions also “implies

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

151

as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence.” Nothing, in Moore’s estimation, was more opposed to the language of the Bible and the Church Fathers. “Cataclysmal geology and special creation are the scientific analogue of Deism. Order, development, law, are the analogue of the Christian view of God.”24 Moore was right about Temple. “Either God is everywhere present in nature or he is nowhere.” God does not “delegate His power to demigods called ‘second causes.’ ”25 Temple had distorted Christian doctrine while seriously misreading Darwin. But Moore’s learned critique also shows how complex and full of traps these encounters were, since Moore failed to recognize that Darwin’s position was itself semi-deistic.26 Darwin spoke of divine laws, but he also left the details of the evolutionary process to chance, suggesting, at best, a finite God – though one less responsible for the truly devilish aspects of evolution. Our final illustration of a theologian’s adjustments and compromises aimed at reconciling Christianity with science is Lyman Abbott (1835–1922), an American Christian evolutionist who occupied the famous pulpit of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, earlier occupied by the great preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Few religious writers exerted a greater influence on the American public in the latter years of the nineteenth century than did Lyman Abbott. He was something of a national patriarch.27 Abbott saw himself as an evolutionist, but not a Darwinian, since he identified the latter with inevitable struggle and the survival of the fittest. Like Henry Drummond, he believed that the evolutionary laws discovered in nature were identical with the laws of the spiritual life and that God is only properly understood in evolutionary and immanentist terms. The old feudal hierarchical model must be cast aside. God resides in the world of nature; and the laws of nature are the laws of God’s own being. Using these and other evolutionary preconceptions, Abbott proceeded to reinterpret Christian beliefs. The Bible was not to be seen as a totality but as “the history of the growth of man’s consciousness of God,”28 and the development of Semitic religion in the Bible “a process of natural selection.”29 His belief in progress from animal instinct to human virtue demanded that he reject the traditional Christian doctrines of the Fall and redemption. “Evolution declares that all life begins at a lower stage and issues in a gradual development into a higher.”30 Sin is “the conscious and deliberate descent of the individual soul from the vantage ground of a higher life to the life of an animal.”31 Abbott viewed spiritual progress as a historical fact; the goal of this spiritual evolution is “the full incarnating of Christ in humanity,” since Christ came not only to exhibit God’s being and will to humanity, “but [also] to evolve the latent divinity which he has implanted in us.”32 Abbott thus emphasized the likeness between God and humanity, writing that “the difference between God and man is a difference not in essential nature,” since, as he believed, the Bible teaches that “in their essential nature they are the same.”33 He saw history as revealing the slow but certain victory of Christian love and fraternal democracy over selfish individualism: “recreating the individual; through the individual constituting a church; and by the church transforming human society into a kingdom of God.”34

152

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

Abbott’s optimistic Christian progressivism was praised by many as a triumphant reconception of Christianity and a successful reconciliation of theology and science. His critics, on the other hand, saw his effort as costly, paid for by a substantial loss of Christian substance. His interpretation of the Bible was highly questionable; his radical divine immanence and divinizing of humanity were, many judged, closer to Pantheism than Christian theism. His notion of sin and redemption was viewed as shallow and naïvely voluntaristic, failing to plumb the predicament of sin or the necessity of grace.

Types of Mediation and Complementarity between Theology and Science Nineteenth-century theologians’ dominant response to scientific advances was one of openness and dialogue, of attempts at one or another form of mediation and reconciliation. While sharing the same objective, these responses often were distinct, and they resist being forced into exact categories. Nonetheless, they do reveal common features that distinguish them from other types of response. The three theologians here used to exemplify this response were orthodox Christians, believed in the essential unity of science and theology, and were not wholly dismissive of Darwin’s doctrine. However, all three concluded that, in present circumstances, no reconciliation with Darwinism was possible. Otto Zöckler (1833–1906), a German theologian who taught at Greifswald, is best known for his four books and numerous articles on the relations between theology and science.35 His most important work is a two-volume, 1,600-page History of the Relations between Theology and Natural Science with Particular Reference to the Story of Creation (1877–1879). It stands as not only a far superior work than A. D. White’s History of the Warfare (Zöckler called the latter “a superficial and bungling piece of work”) but also, perhaps, the best history of the biblical doctrine of creation, explored, as Zöckler examines it, through the history of natural science. In this work Zöckler repudiates the by-then advancing notion of a war. While frank about the hostilities between the two fields, he also stressed the positive influences that they have had on one another and the ways that theology has promoted science. Zöckler was convinced that the proven findings of science – in his context, geology, and evolutionary biology – would harmonize with and complement the biblical stories in Genesis. He called this reconciliation the “concordance hypothesis” and applied it in his extensive studies of the biblical stories of the creation and human origins in relation to developments in geology and biology, the latter especially, after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Zöckler often reiterated his theme that the Book of Nature illustrates the Bible, while the latter serves to explain the former. The two complement one another. Zöckler wrote earlier and more extensively about Darwinism and theology than any other European or American theologian. He included a 248-page discussion

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

153

of Darwinism in his vast History, and concluded that Darwin’s own teachings contained nothing to cause anyone to abandon the Christian doctrine of creation. Indeed, he insisted that the theological doctrines of creation and humanity’s origin are illustrated and thus illuminated by Darwin’s scientific researches, including his hypothesis of natural selection. Zöckler was able to affirm this about Darwin’s work because he believed that theologians had often misread Genesis through preconceived notions about its teaching on creation, and because he did not interpret Darwin’s position as, in the main, anti-teleological, and thus atheistic. Nor did he think that Darwin himself completely rejected Lamarckian inheritance. What later – after Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man (1871) – caused Zöckler to reject conciliation with Darwinism and to repudiate the Englishman’s doctrine was his recognition that Darwin’s naturalistic understanding of the immense, slow, and brutal course of human descent contradicted biblical anthropology that insisted on the unique status of human beings. Zöckler condemned numerous other theological attempts to reconcile Christianity with Darwinism. He regarded them as premature, and he saw their accommodations as seriously deforming Christian doctrine. They had failed to recognize that many scientific hypotheses are soon repudiated by new facts, and that Darwin’s own theories had recently become suspect due to the numerous modifications and qualifications that he introduced in later editions of the Origin. Furthermore, he thought that Darwinian descent, coupling humans with the animals, relativized ethics and supported un-Christian social policies, such as eugenics. For Zöckler, the facts showed that when these particular Darwinian theories are examined as a whole, they are shown to be not only unreliable but also erroneous on crucial matters. On these subjects, the reconciliation between Christian theology and Darwinian science is impossible. The American Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge (1797–1878) was one with Zöckler in his conservative interpretation of the Bible’s supreme authority, in his belief in the unity of truth, in the possibility of a concordance or complementarity between theology and science, and in his final, resolute conviction that Christianity and Darwinism were, on a cardinal issue, irreconcilable. Zöckler thought that Darwin was compatible with a theistic teleology, but that his descent theory and Christian anthropology were incompatible. While Hodge was open to the theory of evolution, even to certain forms of natural selection, he came to the conviction – in his book What Is Darwinism? (1874) – that Darwin’s evolutionary theory was inherently anti-teleological and, therefore, explicitly atheistic. Charles Hodge was professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary for fifty-eight years. As the leader of what came to be called the Princeton Theology, he was arguably the most influential conservative evangelical theologian in the English-speaking world. His three-volume Systematic Theology (1872–1873) is used today in some conservative theological schools. One of Hodge’s principal interests was the relationship between theology and science. He believed in the real unity of natural and revealed truth and the complementarity of theology

154

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

and science. However, he became an astute critic of Darwin and, perhaps, the best example of theological anti-Darwinism in the nineteenth century. Hodge’s writings on theology and science are informed by an explicit philosophical position associated with Scottish commonsense realism, which assumed that the world possesses a rational order that corresponds with the structure of the human mind. It also insisted on the Baconian ideal of induction in both theology and science. In a long discussion of theological method, Hodge draws an exact correlation between scientific induction and the inductive method used in theology. Both sciences affirm that theory must be determined by facts, in the one case by the facts of the Bible, and in the natural sciences by the facts of nature. But all facts are determined by the wisdom and will of God, and therefore cannot conflict with one another. Apparent discrepancies between biblical facts and truth and those of the sciences are due to the imposition of theories, or human speculations, that distort the facts. For Hodge, all theories are human, and hence tentative. And so, just as it is unreasonable for scientists to promote theories inconsistent with the Bible, so is it “unwise for theologians to insist on an interpretation of Scripture which brings it into collision with the facts of science.” Neither the theologian nor the scientist is infallible, and so it may happen, as it often has in the past, “that interpretations of the Bible, long confidently received, must be modified or abandoned, to bring revelation into harmony with what God teaches in his works.” While this may be painful, it does not impair the authority of the Bible. The Scriptures “remain infallible; we are merely convicted of having mistaken their meaning.”36 Hodge often cites the example of Copernicus’ revolution in astronomy. In this case, as in others, “it was not that scripture taught archaic science, but that archaic science had been read into scripture by its interpreters.”37 If persuaded by scientific evidence, Hodge was quite willing to correct his interpretation of the Bible, as he did in acknowledging that the word “day” refers to geological epochs. But he also felt quite justified in resisting any scientific theory that was not clearly supported by the facts or that contradicted what he considered explicit biblical truth. He applied these principles in his examination of Darwinism. Hodge offered scientific, philosophical, and theological objections to Darwinism. He did not reject the possibility of theistic evolution itself, although he saw most forms of evolution as actually deistic, not biblically theistic. His primary scientific objection was that, as Darwin admitted, his theory was a hypothesis, “with no pretence that the theory can be proved.”38 And Hodge was confident that some of the “facts” could be accounted for in other ways. However, Hodge’s critique, based as it was on the paucity of facts, on the absence of links in the fossil record, and on the antiquity and modification of species, was a risky tactic, since later scientific work might, and indeed often did, fill those factual gaps. The strength of Hodge’s critique was theological. It consisted of two related issues that he insisted were crucial to the claims of biblical revelation and Christian faith. One was the uniqueness and immutability of the human

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

155

“primordial form” or soul and, second, God’s providential governance of the world. Both assumed a divine teleology. Hodge came to recognize that the distinctive feature of Darwinism was its use of the mechanism of natural selection in such a way as to exclude all teleology. Hodge was willing to qualify his defense of the immutability of “species” in that he distinguished species from what he called “primordial forms,” and claimed immutability only for those forms. Some “species,” he conceded, may have arisen by natural transformations. It was neither evolution nor natural selection as such that defined Darwinism but its rejection of design in any and all organisms in the natural world, all having evolved “by unintelligent causes.” And this, Hodge insisted, makes Darwinism irreconcilable with Christianity. A final feature of Hodge’s critique has to do with the nature of his appeal to design. He was suspicious of natural theology. He did not appeal to the teleological argument from design, as did many theologians. He was clearly aware of its philosophical shortcomings. Rather, he believed in design because of Christianity’s belief in a providential guidance. Presuming that a providential God exists, then all things must be designed.39 It can be argued that Hodge sensed, better than many of his theological colleagues, the real threat of Darwinism and, furthermore, that his refusal to adopt a vague evolutionary theism was salutary. The Scottish minister James McCosh (1811–1894) is another theologian who defended the unity of nature and revelation, saw them as complementary, and worked for their reconciliation. In an early work he insisted that, despite their obvious differences, it is also true that science and theology “meet in a higher unity … and are two aspects … of one Great Truth.”40 McCosh saw the current exemplification of this truth of complementarity in the growing recognition of evolution or what he called “development,” “the method of God’s procedure.” He had defended this unity before the appearance of Darwin’s Origin, but also after its appearance in his largely positive response to Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection. In this he greatly differed from his colleague-to-be, Charles Hodge. McCosh served for many years as a minister of the Church of Scotland. It was the considerable praise that he received for his first book, The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral (1850), that led to his appointment in 1851 to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Queens College, Belfast, where he taught until 1868. He then accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. Important for McCosh was the eminent British anatomist Richard Owen’s (1804–1892) transcendental morphology, which held that organic structures conform to divinely ordained archetypes. McCosh thought that this better explained design than did Paley’s functional argument. He appealed to two great principles operative in nature’s development. One was “the Principle of Order, Pattern, or Type” to which natural objects conform. The second was “the Principle of Special Adaptation or Particular End” by which an object is “at the same time accommodated to the situation which it has to occupy, and a purpose it is intended to

156

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

serve.”41 McCosh believed that this “wider” teleology of an interconnected, unitary plan was a more compelling support for a natural theology, particularly since it appeared to be supported by distinguished scientists such as Owen and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire: “The agents of nature are so arranged into a system, or rather a system of systems,” so that a complex of independent agents are made to conspire for the achievement of a great end.42 What might appear to us as a useless plant may be needed by one kind of bird for its seeds or by an insect for its root. And these birds and insects may serve a larger purpose in nature’s economy. Therefore, in addition to the necessary Principle of Order there is the Principle of Particular Adaptation, that is, Providence. Scientists who trumpet the Reign of Law fail to take sufficient account of what McCosh calls the “fortuities of Nature.” These “fortuities” may well appear to humans as pure accidents; to God they may be the very instruments of His government. McCosh never felt a need to revise his natural theology after the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species. He thought, rather, that Darwin’s theory of natural selection contained “a large body of important truths,” although he always insisted that “it did not contain the whole truth about evolution.”43 However, McCosh became increasingly certain that natural selection was an agency “undoubtedly” operating in the whole of organic nature, along with the influence of environmental factors, as was proposed by the Lamarckians. It was on the subject of human evolution that McCosh parted company with Darwin. With the religious scientists St. George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who early supported Darwin, McCosh believed that humans represented a unique development that required factors beyond the capacity of natural selection alone to explain. Science may, however, explain these unique factors; and McCosh remained convinced that the advancement of science would see “purpose in the ways in which the materials and forces and life of the universe are made to conspire.”44 McCosh’s Calvinist teleology, with its seemingly unaccountable “fortuities of nature,” was, if nothing else, bracing. The forces of nature, whatever they are, “all and each work in the midst of a struggle for existence, in which the strong prevail and the weak disappear. But in all this,” McCosh was certain, “there is a starting point and a terminus … and an intelligence planning and guiding the whole, and bringing it to its destination.”45

The Theological Critique of Scientific Naturalism and Positivism The growing prestige and authority of the sciences in the latter decades of the nineteenth century provoked a broad cultural reaction against the allencompassing claims of scientific positivism, especially its materialism and determinism. One aspect of this wider reaction was a series of philosophical and theological critiques of the foundational assumptions and the pretensions

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

157

of an all-embracing unified science, but carried out in the service of theistic alternatives. Several were considered decisive. Here this critical appraisal can be illustrated in three contexts. In Germany the critique was associated with a group of Neo-Kantian philosophers and theologians, many of whom were colleagues at Marburg, one of the centers of Neo-Kantianism. Its most prominent theologian was Wilhelm Herrmann, who was introduced earlier. Herrmann included in his defense of theology’s autonomy an impressive criticism of positivistic science itself, based essentially on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Kant had shown the theologians and philosophers, as well as the scientists, the true limits of human knowledge. In Religion in Relation to Knowledge of the World and to Morality (1879), Herrmann seeks to demonstrate that the conclusions of natural science are necessarily provisional. This is because “pure knowledge,” or our making representations of the world, depend on the employment of certain intuitive concepts of space, time, substance, and causality by which the mind unifies a plurality of sensations into objects of human understanding. Herrmann insisted that this knowledge of nature, dependent as it is on empirical sensations, is always in flux: If the knowledge of nature is directed to determining objects and the changes in their states as completely as possible, no definite limits can be imagined for this activity. It lies in the nature of our concepts that our attempts to complete the representation of an object can never totally be drawn to a close.46

This ordering activity of human knowing means that our scientific knowledge only has “hypothetical validity.” But Herrmann was not skeptical regarding “practical” scientific knowledge as long as the science recognized both its hypothetical character and its philosophical limits. In France the critique of scientific positivism and materialism began early in the century with the philosopher François-Pierre Maine de Biran’s (1766–1824) attack on the French philosophes’ materialist psychology. Maine de Biran was the forerunner of the late nineteenth-century French “spiritualist” philosophy associated with Jean Ravaisson (1813–1900), Emile Boutroux (1845–1921), and Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Boutroux’s student. These philosophers were critics of the scientific positivism of Auguste Comte, and they attacked all forms of scientific monism and reductionism that entailed materialist, mechanistic, or determinist doctrines. All three defended a free, spontaneous human will and the inability of science to explain the human mind and human action solely in physico-chemical terms. Bergson’s defense of a spiritual metaphysics is summarized rather nicely in the following résumé of his work: In my Essai sur données immédiates de la Conscience (1896), I succeeded, I hope, in demonstrating the reality of the soul. In L’Evolution creatrice (1907), I presented creation as a fact. From this the existence should stand out clearly of a God freely

158

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

responsible for creation and the generator of both matter and life, through the evolution of the species and the constitution of human personalities.47

Bergson was not a Christian theist, but he and the earlier “spiritualist” philosophers’ defense of a theistic worldview were very important in advancing other forms of theistic belief that also were constructed on a critique of the claims of science. The most important of these theistic apologists were associated with the French “philosophies of action” that supported the cause of Christian theology at the turn of the century. The best representative of this group is Maurice Blondel (1861–1941), who was a colleague of Boutroux at the Sorbonne and professor of philosophy at Aix-en-Provence from 1897 to 1927, and who played a significant, if ambivalent, role in the theological movement known as Roman Catholic Modernism. Implicit throughout Blondel’s major work, L’Action (1893), is his critique of scientific reductionism and of any philosophies that fail to take serious account of the free moral and spiritual nature of humans and their need to aspire to that which transcends nature, that is, God or the supernatural. For Blondel, “action” implies the free, conscious effort of the whole person, not only the will but also the convergence of instinct, will, thought, and faith or trust. And this consciousness continually seeks to fulfill itself, to reach goals, which are never fully satisfied. It is this gap between human potential and achievement that opens up the way to the transcendent. To deny this unique and preeminent aspect of human experience is to fail to take full account of human life. Blondel insists that a true philosophy will, necessarily, take account of this human striving for transcendence as an authentic hypothesis. Theistic belief, however, requires the act of personal choice, for philosophy itself cannot give positive knowledge of the transcendent; it only can reveal the genuine human need for this “undetermined supernatural.” Concurrently in Britain there was a similar reaction against scientific positivism. It, too, sought to demonstrate the incoherence and philosophical inadequacy of scientific naturalism, and this, again, in support of various theistic alternatives. Among these critics of science, James Ward (1843– 1925), the Cambridge psychologist and professor of mental philosophy and logic, stands out. Ward served briefly as a Unitarian pastor in Cambridge, abandoned Christian belief, but retained throughout his professional career a distinctive form of theistic idealism. Like many of the French critics of science, Ward focused his criticism on the incoherences and other deficiencies in the new science of physiological psychology, especially the associationist psychology espoused by J. S. Mill (1806–1873) and by the followers of Alexander Bain, the Scottish psychologist (1818–1903). It was widely agreed at the time that Ward’s critique administered the death blow to associationist psychology. In his Gifford Lectures on Naturalism and Agnosticism (1896–1898), Ward sought to expose not only the incoherences of mental materialism but also the weaknesses in the philosophy of science as it was then expounded by T. H. Huxley,

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

159

W. K. Clifford, and others in the “church scientific.” Sensitive to the dangers of adopting a crude ontological materialism, a number of these scientific naturalists adopted, with Bain, a psychophysical parallelism that affirmed the dissimilarity between matter and mind while positing a perfect parallelism or correspondence between them. Ward saw no such correspondence; after all, parallels are lines that never meet. Ward pointed out that, in fact, Huxley and Clifford either adopted a vague agnosticism on this question or subordinated the psychic or mental to the physical. Either way, there is no real causal interaction. Ward proceeds to show that, for these naturalists, human volition appears to be a mere shadow or symbol of molecular processes in the brain. Intellectual activity (e.g., logical reasoning) therefore is seen as illusionary, determined only by mechanical neural connections. This, Ward insists, is determinism. He then demonstrates how these defenders of physiological psychology begin to waffle incoherently when they discourse on ethics. Huxley tells his readers that “in itself it is of little moment whether we express the phenomenon of matter in terms of spirit, or the phenomenon of spirit in terms of matter.”48 Ward calls this “a sort of book-keeping by double entry,” and “a palpable contradiction.”49 There were British contemporaries of James Ward who also published impressive critiques of naturalistic psychology and ethics. The Idealist philosopher T. H. Green (1836–1882) offered a sustained defense of free will, moral autonomy, and the distinctiveness of the human mind in his Prolegomena to Ethics (1883). The Scottish theologian James Iverach (1839–1933) and the Anglican theologian Aubrey Moore both wrote telling critiques of the naturalist psychology and ethics as they then were exemplified in, for example, the Darwinian physiologist George Romanes’ (1848–1894) Mental Evolution in Man (1888).50 What is notable here is that Ward, Iverach, and Moore all were theists and trained scientists; the latter two were also supportive of Darwin’s theory and were orthodox Christians. What all three wisely opposed were those contemporary forms of scientific naturalism that avowed or covertly entailed a reductive mental materialism and determinism.

Concluding Comments Looking back over the entire span of the nineteenth century, one is struck by how crucial the engagement with science was to the theological enterprise throughout that century. The discussion was pervasive, and it was wide-ranging in the variety of theological responses, as we have seen. Many of the theological analyses and critiques not only were impressive but also proved decisive at the time. Some of these encounters were, of course, rash and over-accommodating, and ill served both theology and science. Yet, we now can see that on the whole, the nineteenth-century theological engagement with the sciences was formative in shaping that relationship in the twentieth century and beyond.

160

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

The neo-Kantian position, as represented by Wilhelm Herrmann, dominated the attitude toward science in Protestant academic theology during the entire first half of the twentieth century. This is evident in the writings of two theological giants of this period, Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884– 1976), and also in the work of other prominent theologians. And this radical separation and independence of the two domains were reinforced by the most influential philosophies of this era, Logical Positivism and Existentialism. The latter half of the twentieth century was, however, strikingly different. First, scientists appeared to be more sensitive to the hypothetical nature of their science, and the fact that scientific work is deeply imbedded in culture. This was reinforced by the work of historians such as Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) and the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings. Also, these latter decades showed a renewed interest in natural theology, for example, in the posthumously published works and influence of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), in the Process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), and in the writings of astrophysicists and theologians espousing the “Anthropic Principle” in cosmology. All of these represent new efforts to relate theology and science. The rich variety of more recent theological responses to science reflects the creative engagement that typified the nineteenth century.

Notes 1 Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley III, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1900), 251–252. 2 T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays II (London: Macmillan, 1893), 52. 3 C. A. Russell writes, “In their bitter battle for scientific hegemony the Victorian scientific naturalists fought largely in vain. But in establishing their myth of an enduring conflict between religion and science they were successful beyond their wildest expectations.” See “The Conflict Metaphor and Its Social Origins,” in Science and Christian Belief I (1989), 26. Among the best accounts and critiques of the “warfare” thesis, see the following: James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870– 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science,” Church History 55 (1986): 338–354; David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987); John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) , chap. 1; Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 1; and Claude Welch, “Dispelling Some Myths about the Split between Theology and Science in the Nineteenth Century,” in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman (New York: Routledge, 1996).

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

4

5

6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19

161

Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (Gothenburg: Elanders Boktryckeni Aktiebolag, 1958), 337. Also, see Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 84. For recent efforts to describe the various ways of envisioning the complex relationships between theology and science, relevant to the nineteenth-century situation, see Ian G. Barbour, “Ways of Relating Science and Religion,” in Religion in an Age of Science, The Gifford Lectures 1889–1891, vol. 1, chap. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); Frederick Gregory, Nature Lost? Natural Science and German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); and John Hedley Brooke, “Interaction between Science and Religion: Some Preliminary Considerations,” in Brooke, Science and Religion; also, consult Brooke’s valuable bibliography on 351–357. For a contemporary discussion of the various ways of relating theology and science, see Niels Henrik Gregerson and J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, eds., Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998). David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube: Ein Bekentniss (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872), 175. William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, vol. 1 (London: Pickering, 1836), 596. For a fine essay on the social implications of natural theology, see Frank M. Turner, “The Secularization of the Social Vision of British Natural Theology,” in Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101–127. Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1883), 11. Drummond, Natural Law, 52. Ibid., xxiii. John Henry Newman, “Duties of the Church toward Knowledge,” in The Idea of a University [1873] (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 154. Newman, “Duties of the Church,” 154. Ibid., 153. For helpful, concise accounts of the major themes in Ritschl’s theology, see Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Volume 2, 1870–1914 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–30; and James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), chap. 11. For brief overviews of the themes in Herrmann’s theology, see Welch, Protestant Thought, 44–54; and Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 281–286. For an excellent treatment of Herrmann’s doctrine of the independent, incommensurable spheres of theology and science, and its significant legacy in excluding nature from the theological enterprise, see Gregory, Nature Lost? part 3 and epilogue, 199–264. For the full account of Baden Powell’s various forays into Christian apologetics as they related to science, see Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Baden Powell, The Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth (Oxford: J. W. Parker, 1839), 1.

162

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

20 Frederick Temple, Lord Bishop of Exeter, The Relation between Religion and Science http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17194 (accessed October 12, 2009), 114. 21 Temple, Religion and Science, 114–115. 22 Ibid., 115. 23 Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith: Essays on Apologetic Subjects (London, 1889), 87. 24 Moore, Science and the Faith, 184–185. 25 Aubrey Moore, “The Christian Doctrine of God,” in Lux Mundi, ed. Charles Gore (London, 1889), 43–44. 26 I owe this judgment about Moore to J.H. Brooke. 27 Ira V. Brown, Lyman Abbott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 2. 28 Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (London, 1892), 66. 29 Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity, 249. 30 Ibid., 206. 31 Ibid., 227. 32 Ibid., 250–251. 33 Lyman Abbott, The Theology of an Evolutionist (London, 1897), 188–189. 34 Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, op. cit., 258. 35 For the best treatment in English of Zöckler’s work on the relations between theology and science, on which this account is dependent, see Frederick Gregory’s Nature Lost? chap. 4. 36 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1872), 56–59, 624. 37 Jonathan Wells, Charles Hodge’s Critique of Darwinism (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1988), 52. Wells’s exposition of Hodge’s method and argument has been very helpful and is recommended to anyone exploring the subject of Hodge on science and theology. 38 Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1874), 144–145. 39 For a full exposition of Hodge on the argument to design, see Wells, Charles Hodge’s Critique, 52. 40 James McCosh and George Dickie, Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation (New York, 1857), 5. 41 McCosh and Dickie, Typical Forms, 1. 42 James McCosh, The Method of Divine Government, Physical and Moral (Edinburgh, 1850), 121. 43 James McCosh, Christianity and Positivism (New York, 1875), 42. 44 McCosh, Christianity and Positivism, 90. 45 Ibid. 46 Wilhelm Herrmann, Die Religion im Verhaltnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit (Halle, 1879), 14. See, Gregory, Nature Lost? 231ff. Also, see W. Herrmann, “Faith as Ritschl Defined It,” in Faith and Morals (London, 1904), 7–62. 47 Henri Bergson, Études, February 20, 1911. Cited in A. Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, vol. 2 (New York, 1961), 317. 48 T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays (London, 1893), 164. 49 James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 4th ed. (London, 1915), 351.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

163

50 See James Iverach, Christianity and Evolution (London, 1894); and, Aubrey Moore, “Mental Evolution in Man,” in Essays Scientific and Philosophical (London, 1890).

Bibliography The primary writings of the theologians and the religious writers engaged in the nineteenth-century encounter with science are mentioned in the relevant parts of the chapter and fully cited in the notes.

Secondary Sources Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Chapters 1, 4, 7, and 8 are excellent on the nineteenth century. See the very helpful bibliographical essays on 380–399. Cantor, Geoffrey. Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist. London: Macmillan, 1991. A fascinating study of the great nineteenth-century scientist and how his conservative Christian beliefs and his science interacted in numerous important ways. Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Part 2 includes superb brief accounts of the ways in which secular science and historical studies challenged religious belief and theology in the nineteenth century. Gillespie, Neal C. Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Gillespie shows how theological and positivist ideas coexisted in Darwin’s mind as he worked on the Origin. Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Genesis and Geology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951. The author demonstrates the interpenetration of theology and geological science in the early nineteenth century. Gregory, Frederick. Nature Lost? Natural Science and German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. A valuable study of the variety of responses to natural science by several important German theologians – and the loss of nature from theological discourse. Lindberg, David C., and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.). God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Chapters 12 through 15 deal with aspects of the nineteenth-century encounter. Livingstone, David N. Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987. Demonstrates that many evangelical Christian theologians and scientists reconciled their conservative theology to Darwin’s theories. Moore, James R. The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. The most complete and authoritative study of the Anglo-American theological response to Darwin. Turner, Frank M. Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. A valuable study of

164

JAMES C. LIVINGSTON

the late nineteenth-century critique of scientific naturalism and positivism and the search for new spiritual alternatives. Welch, Claude. Dispelling Some Myths about the Split between Theology and Science in the Nineteenth Century. In Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman. New York: Routledge, 1996.

CHAPTER 8

Romanticism and Pantheism Julia A. Lamm

Introduction Fixing beginning points is always difficult. And yet for nineteenth-century theology, a beginning can be marked fairly precisely: Germany in the last decade of the eighteenth century. In 1796, the so-called German Romantic circle formed, and, in an astonishingly short period of time, these early German Romantics developed distinctive theories of art, music, literature, philosophy, and religion that would shape religious thought throughout the long nineteenth century. In particular, early German Romanticism marks the beginning of nineteenthcentury theology not just because the young Friedrich Schleiermacher was part of the Romantic circle, but also because central to the Romantics’ concerns were such fundamental issues as freedom, history, subjectivity, God, and the relation between God and the world. The Romantics challenged the theological discourse of the Enlightenment and of established religious authorities; the ways in which they reformulated and then answered fundamental questions would reverberate throughout the next century. In short, if Immanuel Kant provides the background to nineteenth-century theology, then Romanticism is the fertile ground from which it grew. Integral to the worldview of the early Romantics was a bold new way of envisaging the relation between the infinite and the finite. As one scholar has put it, referring to English and German Romanticism alike, “[T]he best general designation for their message and meaning would be pantheism or, perhaps, panentheism.”1 This description has the advantage of being simple, and it does indeed capture something the early Romantics shared, insofar as (in the early years, at least) they criticized the traditional view of a personal extra-mundane God, and they extolled nature as something active, alive, and teeming with possibilities. The problem is, of course, that “pantheism” is even more difficult to define than “Romanticism.” The term itself was not coined until the early eighteenth century and since its

166

JULIA A. LAMM

inception has carried so many definitions as to be virtually meaningless.2 Pantheism is usually defined as the position that identifies God and the world, but few who are assigned the label (or, for that matter, few of those who willingly embrace it) actually identify God and world without maintaining some distinction. And, of course, in assigning labels such as “Romanticism” and “pantheism,” we run the risk of decontextualizing, hence of misinterpreting, the object(s) of our study. In this essay, I seek to recontextualize the so-called pantheism of early German Romanticism (Frühromantik). This requires going back a decade or so before the formation of the “Romantic circle” in Jena in 1796. The Romantics were profoundly influenced by the three defining intellectual events of the 1780s (and arguably of the century): the sudden dominance of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, the eruption of the pantheist controversy (Pantheismusstreit), and the mesmerizing force of the French Revolution. In other words, the Romantics were self-consciously post-Kantian, Neo-Spinozist, and (albeit in a qualified way) pro-revolutionary. Although my concern here will be with the second of these influences, since their “pantheism” can only be understood in terms of the revival of Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632–1677) in late eighteenth-century Germany, it is important to keep in mind that intellectually the three events cannot be separated. I shall argue that the so-called pantheism of early German Romantics is best understood as a Neo-Spinozism and, further, that pantheism and Spinozism, although sometimes used interchangeably, were for them really distinct categories. In the next section, I focus on the infamous pantheist controversy that erupted between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), explaining what was at stake and what new ground was laid that prepared the way for Romanticism. I argue that, while what was at stake was nothing less than the traditional doctrines of God and free will, there was also something more. Using and reviving Spinoza, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and the yet unknown (and still pre-Romantic) Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) began to develop a “third alternative” between, on the one hand, a traditional understanding of a personal God and, on the other, nihilism and atheism. In the third and following section, I turn to early Romanticism itself, describing it as a vital expression of that third alternative. I argue that the Romantics did not simply identify God and nature, nor did they deny the transcendence of God; rather, they developed a theory of what may be called a dynamic coincidence of opposites that helped them reunite what had been separated, while yet maintaining the distinction. In the next section, I return to the initial question of whether the early Romantics were pantheists and argue two subtheses. First, although Spinoza figured prominently in their thought, the Romantics did not incorporate the details of Spinoza’s philosophy into their own; rather, their fascination had more to do with Spinoza’s person and how that fit with their own ideal of the Romantic genius-hero. Their

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

167

Spinozism was thus more poetic than doctrinal. Second, the Romantics rarely used the term “pantheism.” but when they did, it usually represented not their own view, but an extreme that stood over against its opposing element, theism. Granted, they occasionally referred to this “third way” as pantheism (much as John Toland and Herder had done before them), but really they found their “third way” by sustaining the tension between theism and pantheism. Finally, in a brief concluding section, I shall sketch the trajectories of early German Romanticism to England and then across the Atlantic to America, for there were many kinds of Romanticisms and pantheisms in nineteenth-century religious thought, art, and literature – each distinctive in its own way, and yet most of which can be traced back to Germany in the 1790s.

The Pantheism Controversy (Pantheismusstreit) Indeed, I can barely comprehend how one can be a poet without admiring Spinoza, loving him, and becoming entirely his. (Friedrich Schlegel)3 Respectfully offer up with me a lock of hair to the manes of the holy rejected Spinoza! (Friedrich Schleiermacher)4 The significance of Spinoza for the early German Romantics is to be found in the story that explains how the dominant view changed from Pierre Bayle’s (1647– 1706) description of Spinozists as those “who have hardly any religion”5 to Novalis’ description of Spinozism as “a supersaturation with the divine.”6 That turning point is not to be found in Romanticism itself but in its precursor, the Storm and Stress movement (Sturm und Drang), the first major revolt against the German enlightenment (Aufklärung). Jacobi and Herder both used Spinoza to undertake thoroughgoing attacks on what they took to be the hyper-rationalism of the Aufklärung, but whereas the former still remained within the basic dualistic metaphysical framework of the Aufklärung, the latter began to articulate a third alternative which, influenced by recent discoveries in chemistry and biology, was an organic, monistic view of the universe. It was this third alternative, Neo-Spinozism, that the Romantics would take up in yet another intellectual framework. It would be far too simplistic to suggest that, with the pantheism controversy in Germany, Spinoza first enjoyed support. The fact is, Spinoza always had his friends. Those who boldly embraced him and his philosophical views were for the most part “free thinkers” who lived cautiously at the margins of society. They had to be discreet, since to be “Spinozist” was to have republican leanings, a politically dangerous position in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By and large, it was his detractors who held the (political, religious, and academic) power and who thus molded the dominant view of Spinoza’s thought as atheistic. Spinoza

168

JULIA A. LAMM

himself was perturbed by accusations of atheism, writing of one such accuser, “The foundation of his reasoning is, that he thinks I take away freedom from God, and subject [God] to fate. This is flatly false.”7 His protestations were of no avail, at least not in Germany, where Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754) made every effort to discredit his philosophy and to distinguish theirs from his. By the middle of the eighteenth century, therefore, the labels “atheism,” “pantheism,” and “Spinozism” were used virtually synonymously (despite the fact that Toland had coined the term “pantheism” precisely to distinguish his views from atheism). This helps to explain the sense of scandal when Jacobi – upon hearing that Mendelssohn planned to write something about the “character”of theirrecentlydeceasedfriend,GottholdEphraimLessing(1729–1781)– asked a mutual friend whether Mendelssohn knew that “Lessing had been a Spinozist.”8 Mendelssohn had no choice but to ask Jacobi to explain himself, and the controversy began. The controversy, which spanned an entire decade, had four phases to it: a leisurely conversation between Lessing and Jacobi over the course of two summer mornings in 1780; a semiprivate exchange of letters between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, 1783–1784; the public airing of the controversy through the almost simultaneous publication of Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden, or Lectures on the Existence of God and Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza, in 1785; and Herder’s response to Jacobi in God: Some Conversations in 1787, which brought Jacobi’s rebuttal in 1789.

The conversation On the surface, the controversy swirled around the “orthodox” theological doctrines of God and free will, but it also had a deep undertow that would pull the conversation in an unchartered direction – toward the edge of “nothingness.” It all began in a conversation prompted by Goethe’s poem “Prometheus.” It did not take long for Spinoza’s name to be uttered. As Jacobi recounted the conversation, Lessing had admitted, “The point of view from which the poem is treated is my own point of view…. The orthodox concepts of the Divinity are no longer for me; I cannot stomach them. Hen kai pan [One and All]! I know of nothing else. That is also the direction of the poem, and I must confess that I like it very much.” Jacobi replied, “Then you must be pretty well in agreement with Spinoza.” Lessing rejoined, “If I am to name myself after anyone, I know of nobody else.” Interrupted, they continued the conversation the next morning. Lessing began, “I have come to talk to you about my hen kai pan. Yesterday you were frightened.” Jacobi conceded, “You surprised me, and I may indeed have blushed and gone pale, for I felt bewilderment in me. Fright it was not. To be sure, there is nothing that I would have suspected less, than to find a Spinozist or a pantheist in you. And you blurted it out to me so suddenly. In the main I had come to get help from you against Spinoza.” To this, Lessing could

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

169

only say, “Then there is no help for you. Become his friend all the way instead. There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.” Jacobi and Lessing agreed at least on this: the God of the philosophers of the Aufklärung was not a God in which either one was interested. Also, both wanted to avoid the skepticism that presented itself as the reasonable response to the crisis of history (which Lessing himself helped to inaugurate)9 and the crisis of metaphysics (which impelled Kant to write his Critique of Pure Reason [1781]). Whereas Lessing found in Spinoza an attractive alternative to skepticism, Jacobi found in Spinoza the perfect representative of skepticism. Indifferent to the notion of free will, Lessing was satisfied with Spinoza’s moral determinism. Bored with the idea of a personal God, he found relief in the ancient view of the “One and All,” which he interpreted as meaning that the “One” is the soul of the “All.” According to Jacobi, the hen kai pan was “the sum concept of [Lessing’s] theology and philosophy.” This, however, is a slippery sort of Spinozism. And yet, as Lessing himself pointed out, in denying free will, he was merely being a good Lutheran. Moreover, neither the dictum “One and All” nor the notion of a world soul is to be found in Spinoza’s writings. Both were included in Toland’s description of pantheism, but Lessing’s appeal to the hen kai pan appears to have been a reference to certain pre-Socratic philosophers. Finally (again, if we are to trust Jacobi), Lessing tossed in some of the mysticism of the cabbala. Lessing’s “Spinozism” was thus an unlikely mixture of several varied elements. Lessing had read Spinoza carefully enough to have been able to come up with a stricter kind of Spinozism, but perhaps he had learned that it was safer to be enigmatic about such things. Still, on a carefree summer morning he asked a friend, “How on earth can you believe the opposite of Spinozism?”10 Jacobi replied, “On the contrary, I draw back from a philosophy that makes perfect scepticism a necessity.” How could Spinoza, that confident rationalist, be considered a skeptic? Because, Jacobi argued, the principle a nihilo nihil fit is the very “soul” of Spinoza’s philosophy: nothing comes from nothing. Everything else that belongs to the “spirit of Spinozism” – materialism, fatalism, and atheism – follow necessarily from this one principle.

The controversial issues Jacobi was convinced that Lessing’s Spinozism, although seemingly non-doctrinal, in fact rested on the doctrines of materialism, determinism, and atheism; consequently, not only was it inimical to faith, but also it undermined the possibility of philosophy because it leads in the end to what Jacobi termed “nihilism.” Materialism. Phrased more positively, a nihilo nihil fit means that everything must be able to be explained in terms of efficient causality–that is to say, in terms of a prior, similar cause, which was itself caused by a like cause, “and so on to infinity.” This infinity of efficient causes is an infinite one of material, mechanistic causes – a

170

JULIA A. LAMM

consequence, according to Jacobi, of Spinoza’s monism (Deus sive natura, “God or nature”), of his definition of God as extended substance and immanent cause (natura naturans, “naturing nature”), and of his view of nature as essentially passive (natura naturata, “natured nature”). Hence, the natural determinism that follows from the principle a nihilo nihil fit is nothing less than an unremitting materialism. The material world is self-determining. Whatever direction the “concatenation of purely efficient causes” can be said to take, it is not determined by intelligent design but by what relations happen to occur. Fatalism. “The consistent determinist,” Jacobi concluded, “does not differ from the fatalist.” In applying the principle a nihilo nihil fit and thus emphasizing efficient causality, Spinoza excludes any role for final causality. Indeed, Spinoza did reject final causes, in both senses of the term: he denied that an act of thought (an intelligent cause) can effect a change in the material or bodily world; and he also denied that there is purpose or that nature is directed toward an end. Jacobi well understood that Spinoza did not thereby deny all freedom, but he insisted nonetheless that moral determinism reduces us to being mere spectators of our own lives: “If there are only efficient, but no final, causes, then the only function that the faculty of thought has in the whole of nature is that of observer; its proper business is to accompany the mechanism of the efficient causes.” Deprived of final causes and stripped of free will, we are rendered passive, unable to determine our own actions and thus unaccountable for those actions. Whereas morality is based on the conviction that our thoughts precede and cause our bodily actions, Spinoza’s determinism (according to Jacobi) is based on the premise that actions precede and cause our thoughts. Jacobi thought that this followed inevitably from Spinoza’s materialism. Because the mind is dependent on the body to obtain knowledge of the extra-mental world, it is always reacting, never acting. Atheism. The principle a nihilo nihil fit, in seeking a prior, natural, similar cause, presupposes that nothing is unconditioned. In a word, its logical conclusion can only be atheism. Everything is finite and conditioned; the infinite and unconditioned have no meaning. As Jacobi sees it, the only conclusion is that reason, which proceeds according to the principle a nihilo nihil fit, cannot lead us to God because it cannot lead us beyond the finite and conditioned. Reason leads us only to the immanent God of Spinoza, but this God, which has neither intellect nor will, is no God at all. Rejecting such an empty idea of God, Jacobi asserted, “I believe in an intelligent personal cause of the world.” He was serious and literal when he spoke of a personal God: God must be understood to have a “personality,” by which he meant a “unity of self-consciousness”; this means a God who is pure self-consciousness, without any extension; this means a God outside of this conditioned, finite, material world. What is needed, at least for the philosopher, is a salto mortale (a fatal leap). This was no “leap of faith,” nor was it even a leap across Lessing’s broad ditch; it was, rather, “leaping with your head down,” which for the philosopher means a total reversal of the scales.

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

171

Jacobi’s admission that he had visited Lessing in the hope of gaining an ally against Spinoza provides a clue as to what his agenda was, but that agenda was not the obvious one. As mentioned above, anti-Spinozism was firmly entrenched in the German enlightenment: Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant had all found it necessary to refute Spinoza’s philosophy. If Jacobi’s real concern had been merely to protect orthodox conceptions of God and free will, he would have found good company in the leading figures of the Aufklärung. Jacobi’s critique of Spinoza was instead a ruse to criticize the Aufklärung itself. “I love Spinoza,” he revealed, “because he, more than any other philosopher, has led me to the perfect conviction that certain things admit of no explication.” Spinoza represented to him the very essence of rationalistic philosophy. Noting Leibniz’s insight that “Spinozism is exaggerated Cartesianism,” he argued in effect that the rationalism of the Leibniz-Wolffian school that culminated in the transcendental idealism of Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was nothing else but exaggerated Spinozism. He employed two strategies to make his point and to expose the shaky foundations of the Aufklärung: he first demonstrated how all philosophy, all operations of reason, depend on “faith” (Glaube); he then radicalized that insight by claiming that rationalism leads to “nihilism” (a term coined by Jacobi). Faith. The method of all rationalistic philosophy is to explain, to give a naturalistic account for every fact, to find a cause which can be dissected and explained. Yet in the end, the “principle of sufficient reason” is never really met, since the ground is never discovered. “Everything that reason can produce through division … is simply a natural thing. Reason too, as restricted being, belongs among these things.” That, however, is what David Hume, the skeptic, had maintained. So how does this avoid skepticism? Jacobi contended that it was none other than Hume who helped him to see that “if every assent to truth not derived from rational grounds is faith, then conviction based on rational grounds must itself derive from faith, and must receive its force from faith alone.” Jacobi thus developed a philosophy of faith that safeguards realism (the position that “there actually are things outside us – that our representations and concepts conform to them just as we have them before us”).11 Such a conviction, which Jacobi also calls faith (Glaube) or feeling (Gefühl), is immediate and thus prior to the operations of the faculty of representation. This means that the salto mortale for which he called is something we are always already doing. Rather than being a “nonphilosophy,” as his critics charged, it was a call to recognize the inherent limits of reason. The philosopher is one who seeks to “unveil existence, and to reveal it” by finding and defining, rather than attempting to establish, the boundary between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible. The role of philosophy is not to ascertain the unconditioned but to recognize the boundary of where reason can bring us. Instead, the rationalists pretend to explain the unconditioned in terms of the conditioned, a task which is inherently “irrational.” Rationalism, the fundamental project of the Aufklärung, is thus deluded: seeking rational (hence natural) explanation, it must presuppose faith.

172

JULIA A. LAMM

Nihilism. This defense of realism held against critical (Kantian) philosophy as much as it did pre-critical philosophy. Jacobi contended that transcendental idealism is nothing other than “inverted Spinozism.” Idealism (Kant and Fichte) leads to “nihilism” just as much as materialism (Spinoza) does. Whereas in his On the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785, 1789) Jacobi had focused on the empty concept of God and the passive subject it entailed, in his Open Letter to Fichte (1799) he exposed the empty concept of the self in transcendental idealism: Thus the human spirit, since its philosophical understanding will simply not reach beyond its own production, must … become world-creator, indeed, its own creator…. But it can be even its own creator only under the stated universal condition, viz. it must annihilate itself according to its being so as to arise, to possess itself, in concept alone – in the concept of a pure absolute exodus and return (from nothing, to nothing, for nothing, into nothing).12

The salto mortale he had encouraged Lessing to take almost twenty years earlier is all the more urgently necessary: “Man has this choice, however, and this alone: Nothingness or a God. If he chooses nothingness, he makes himself unto a God.”13 It comes back to the same point–that of a personal God: “I repeat: God is, and is outside me, a living, self-subsisting being, or I am God. There is no third.”14 Theism or atheism – that was the choice. Pantheism was not a true option, Jacobi thought, because in denying a personal God it shows itself to be nothing but atheism. Yet, however much he had railed against the Aufklärung’s undue confidence in reason, Jacobi still inhabited its bifurcated world. Jacobi’s stark either/or between faith and reason, between a personal God and nothingness, was just the newest rendition of the basic Cartesian dualism between mind and body. In introducing Spinoza into the debate, however, he unwittingly paved the way for a middle way.

The emergence of Neo-Spinozism Apparently not having learned his lesson from trying but failing to find an ally in Lessing, Jacobi sent a copy of his account of the conversation to his friend and fellow critic of pure reason, Herder. In Herder’s response, God: Some Conversations (1787), we find the turning point in the reception of Spinoza in Germany. For Herder (and, later, for the early Romantics), Spinoza represented an alternative to atheism and theism. First, however, Spinoza’s philosophy had to be brought up to date. Herder thought that Spinoza did not need vindication so much as he needed to be translated, since the reason Spinoza had been so misunderstood had to do not with the content of his philosophy but with its rationalistic form. So Herder systematically set about translating Spinoza into the philosophical language of late eighteenth-century Germany, the language informed by recent developments in biology and chemistry. A paradigm shift in

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

173

philosophy and theology therefore followed a paradigm shift in science. Previously, astronomy and mathematics had provided the scientific model of the universe and, as a result, if we take Jacobi as an example, the transcendence of the living God stood over against the inert matter and mechanistic causality of nature. When chemistry and biology suggested a new model of the universe, livingness became the essential principle of all reality, and, as a result, the transcendence of the living God no longer needed to be explained spatially – as outside, above, or beyond. “Substance” thus became “substantial force”; the divine “attributes” became “organic forces.” Having thus rejected Jacobi’s premise that Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence was inescapably a form of materialism, Herder could then proceed to disarm Jacobi’s accusation of fatalism and atheism. Herder transposed Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence into a worldview according to which there is no inert matter or vacuous space, only a system of living, active, interrelated forces. He developed, in other words, an organic monism, what he called a world-nexus. Once reality is viewed in this way, the trace of Cartesian dualism that remained in Spinoza – the causal chasm between thought and extension – is dissolved, since mind and body are both understood as forces, as just two of an infinite number of forces, all of which interact with one another. Consequently, the great divide between efficient causality and final causality also dissolves, since the former are no longer understood as blind, mechanistic causes, nor is the latter to be understood in terms of external, intelligent causes. Causality is one and the same and has to do with the coalescence of forces, all of which “work in every point of creation, in accordance with the most perfect wisdom and goodness.”15 The dual threat of fatalism and atheism is thus obviated, since every force and every combination of forces act harmoniously together, according to the eternal laws that are given in the very structure and nature of the whole, and since those laws are determined by none other than a benevolent deity, who is best understood as the infinite, substantial force (Urkraft) that underlies all finite, organic forces. “We swim,” Herder wrote, “in an ocean of omnipotence.”16 More than simply defend Spinoza against Jacobi’s charges of atheism, he attacked Jacobi’s notion of a personal, extra-mundane God: “God is not the world, and the world is not God, so much is certain. But it seems to me that with the ‘extra’ and the ‘supra,’ not much good is done. When one speaks of God one must forget all idols of space and time.”17 In other words, Jacobi, in attempting to protect the notion of God’s transcendence, only subjected God to other finite categories. His insistence on God having “personality” – which, Herder argued, is a limiting concept – is only a case in point. In contrast, borrowing from Anthony Ashley Cooper (Third Earl of) Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and his adaptation of Cambridge Platonism, Herder explained the divine transcendence in terms of the ever-active divine benevolence that manifests itself “in an infinite number of forces in an infinite number of ways.”18 Using Spinoza, Herder forged what he thought was a middle way between theism and atheism.

174

JULIA A. LAMM

In 1793–1794, a young university student, Friedrich Schleiermacher, as yet unknown to the philosophical and theological world, would immerse himself in the debates over Spinoza. In two essays on Spinoza, he formed basic commitments that he would carry through into later, and much more theologically significant, works. His argument was very similar to Herder’s except that, whereas Herder, a onetime student of Kant, had never accepted Kant’s critical philosophy, Schleiermacher had, and enthusiastically so. He developed a post-Kantian Spinozism characterized by four themes: an organic monism (influenced by Herder), an ethical determinism, a post-critical realism (influenced by Jacobi), and a non-anthropomorphic view of God.19 Just a few years later, these same themes would be recast in a Romantic mold. In summary, in the decade before the formation of the Romantic circle in Jena there was a revival of Spinoza in Germany. What has been called the “pantheism” of the Romantics cannot be understood apart from this particular context. It was closely tied to the person of Spinoza, and conceptually it was deeply influenced by Neo-Spinozism. The Romantics’ religious view of the universe, the fullest account of which is given in Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), was not some ahistorical pantheism that simply identified God and nature. On the contrary, it was an attempt to prove Jacobi wrong by developing a “third way” between traditional theism and atheism.

Early German Romanticism (Frühromantik) [I]f you haven’t yet understood Spinoza, discover for the present the true religious conception of the universe in the [SPEECHES] ON RELIGION. (Friedrich Schlegel)20 Early German Romanticism marked something genuinely new – the coalescence of astounding literary talents with strong philosophical impulses, first in Jena and then in Berlin. The veins of historical influences are, of course, detectable, but they are not finally determinative. Those who formed the inner circle of early Romanticism were a new generation of inspired authors who had immersed themselves in the classics of antiquity and modernity. The Schlegel brothers had both studied ancient Greek literature intensively; A. W. Schlegel (1767–1845) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) translated Shakespeare into German; Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) collaborated on the enormous project of translating and interpreting Plato’s works.21 All of this philological and literary activity stemmed from the new, “modern” classicism of the day. Moreover, the Romantics had, almost every one of them, been weaned philosophically on Kant’s critical philosophy, and the Jena circle in particular had close ties to the philosophers Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) and Fichte, both of whom sought to carry out the principles of the critical philosophy more consistently, and more radically, than Kant himself had. That being said, the early

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

175

Romantics saw themselves as revolutionaries who consciously and decisively made a break from the Aufklärung. Yet its impulses were not merely reactionary; it had its own internal causes. Friedrich Schlegel’s description of a “new mythology” seems applicable to the Romantic movement itself: it “emerge[d] only from the innermost depths of the spirit and develop[ed] only from itself.”22 The very term “Romantic” (romantisch) was coined by Friedrich Schlegel, the leading theorist of the early German Romantics, to distinguish the new movement from the “modern.” The initial break was in literary theory, but it had ramifications in all disciplines. In fact, one of the goals of early Romanticism was to reintegrate the various disciplines. According to Schlegel, Romantic poetry [Poesie] is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical…. It alone can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age. And it can also – more than any other form – hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power…. The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never to be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free.23

Their “philosophy of poetry” dissolved the typical modern categorization of literary forms and called for the establishment of an entirely new canon, one determined not by epoch or genre but by the “element of poetry.”24 It likewise challenged modern philosophy’s entrenched habit of isolating reason from the rest of human experience. Unlike Jacobi, however, the Romantics did not seek to subordinate reason to faith; rather, they reclaimed reason by reuniting it with feeling (Gefühl) and by restoring its original relation to poetry. In the Romantic canon, Plato, an ancient philosopher who attacked the poets, is a Romantic poet and artist; Shakespeare, a modern poet, is a Romantic philosopher; and Spinoza, a modern rationalistic philosopher, is a Romantic poet. Two characteristics distinguish these three very different authors as “Romantic.” They all had what Schleiermacher called “the sensibility and taste for the infinite”;25 it could be said of each that, in the words of Schlegel, he “drink[s] the absolute like water.”26 Also, each of them brilliantly and artfully expressed this vision of the infinite by maintaining the tension between opposites, whether the opposition is between the infinite and the finite or between two finite components. These two related sensibilities – a sense of the immediacy of the infinite and a creative tension of opposites – are what constitute the so-called pantheism of the early German Romantics, if it can be called a pantheism at all. Influenced by Herder’s Neo-Spinozism, they developed a philosophy of

176

JULIA A. LAMM

immanence that can be characterized as a dynamic coincidence of opposites. Schleiermacher wrote, “You know that the deity, by an immutable law, has compelled itself to divide its great work endlessly, to fuse together each definite being only out of two opposing forces, and to realize each of its eternal thoughts in twin forms that are hostile to each other and yet exist inseparably only through each other.”27 The true Romantic, or the truly religious person, maintains the tension between opposites, without losing either side, because she or he recognizes that all finite opposition is ontologically grounded in the unity or coincidence (not identification) of the infinite and the finite. Spinoza figured hugely for the Romantics in their attempt to hold the infinite and finite together. Where Jacobi had found materialism, fatalism, atheism, and nihilism, they found vital immanence, a “higher” realism, creative freedom, and true religion. Their appropriation of Spinoza went beyond that of Lessing and Herder in its aesthetic ideal and its metaphysical underpinnings.

Divine immanence Like Spinoza, the Romantics understood God, the infinite, as immanent. Like Herder, they transformed Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence into an organic monism, although they added their own Romantic touches. Schleiermacher described the relation of immanence as a “marriage of the infinite with the finite.”28 He bade his friends “to penetrate into nature’s interior. Its chemical power, the eternal laws according to which bodies themselves are formed and destroyed, these are the phenomena in which we intuit the universe most clearly and in a most holy manner. See how attraction and repulsion determine everything and are uninterruptedly active everywhere.”29 Because the infinite is absolutely living and active, nature itself is living and “forcibly draws dead matter into its life.”30 The infinite is absolutely living and active, continually revealing itself through nature and its relations. “Everything finite,” Schleiermacher explained, “exists only through the determination of its limits, which must, as it were, ‘be cut out of ’ the infinite.”31 It follows that the infinite is known only in and through the finite. As Schlegel put it, “The divine can communicate and express itself only indirectly in the sphere of nature.”32 Their experience of the infinite, however, unlike that of Herder, was one of excess. Shaftesbury’s Platonism had tempered Herder’s Neo-Spinozism: Herder described God in terms of beauty, wisdom, and benevolence – attributes Spinoza had considered to be human illusions. The Romantics did speak of the divine love, but their infinite was more Dionysian than Platonic (or, to be more precise, their Platonism emphasized eros over forms). It is not just that the infinite permeates the finite – it saturates, teems, and spills. It is thus less predictable and tame than Herder’s substantial force. There is a profusion that cannot be contained in the finite, and yet, because of its immanence, the infinite fully presents itself in and through the finite. The result is an “infinite chaos.”33 Lest that be misunderstood,

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

177

Schleiermacher suggested that “infinite chaos” is “actually the most suitable and highest symbol of religion”34 because it could not be arbitrarily dissected and categorized. In other words, it signals the transcendence of the infinite. This view of the infinite not only as immanent but also as extravagant entailed both a different approach and a different attitude, one that can take in the incongruity of the infinite and finite without losing either. Reason cannot capture this. Philosophy was rebuked because it “classifies the universe and divides it into this being and that, seeks out the reasons for what exists, and deduces the necessity of what is real while spinning the reality of the world and its laws out of itself.”35 Even Spinoza was told to “put away the militant attire of systematic philosophy and share the dwelling in the temple of new poetry with Homer and Dante, joining the household gods and friends of every god-inspired poet.”36 Schleiermacher argued that only religion could begin to absorb the actions of the infinite because “its essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences.”37 This is nothing less than a form of realism, but one very different from Jacobi’s.

A “new” and “higher” realism However indebted the Romantics were to Fichte’s idealism, they also railed against his quest for first principles, attempt at system, and assertion of the ego. They were themselves idealists insofar as they recognized and celebrated the productive and creative powers of the subject in the process of knowing.38 Yet their starting point was not self-consciousness but the experience of the universe pressing in upon them and expressing itself through them. The early Romantics insisted that idealism and realism must be held together because, in fact, both are related in the ground of unity. In thus maintaining this tension between idealism and realism, the Romantics went beyond the philosophical options of their day. As Schlegel put it, “Idealism in any form must transcend itself in one way or another, in order to be able to return to itself and remain what it is. Therefore, there must and will arise from the matrix of idealism a new and equally infinite realism.”39 This “new realism” materializes in and through poetry (Poesie), because only poetry can hold the two sides, the real and the ideal, together.40 The “new realism” of the Romantics, “since it must be of idealistic origin and must hover as it were over an idealistic ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the ideal and real.” 41 In the next line, Schlegel named Spinoza as the prime example of the poetic philosopher who holds realism and idealism together. Along the same lines, Schleiermacher identified the intuition of the universe as the “hinge” of his entire second speech on religion. He had Fichte in mind when he wrote, “And how will the triumph of speculation, the completed and rounded idealism, fare if religion does not counterbalance it and allow it to

178

JULIA A. LAMM

glimpse a higher realism than that which it subordinates to itself so boldly and for such good reason? Idealism will destroy the universe by appearing to fashion it; it will degrade it to a mere allegory, to an empty silhouette of our own limitedness.”42 In the next line he sang an ode to Spinoza, adding that “the high world spirit permeated him, the infinite was his beginning and end.”

Imagination This “higher realism” required a new mode of understanding and interpretation. The Romantics focused on the role of imagination in forming concepts – something Kant had left undeveloped in his first critique. The imagination marks that transitional stage between the receptive sensibility and spontaneous understanding. Keep in mind that the Romantics viewed the world as an organic, living system. It follows that the imagination for them was both receptive, in that it takes up the forces that acted upon the subject, and spontaneous, in that it combines those forces in a novel way, and so contributes a new force to the universe. For some, that new coalescence of forces is given back in the production of art. For others (presumably for Schleiermacher, whose artistic talents did not match those of his fellow Romantics), it is given back quietly through the development of “one’s inner humanity into distinctness, expressing it in manifold acts.”43 This, by the way, for the Romantics, was freedom – not a transcendental freedom by which we exert ourselves over and apart from the universe, but a creative freedom by which we first take up the forces (including social relations and love) that coalesce in us and then combine them in a unique way. In so doing, we become a microcosm of the whole. The imagination is also where the infinite and the finite meet most perfectly. The uniqueness of the moment when each person’s sense of the infinite is first stimulated – the particular combination of forces and mediations, as well as the unique patterns of activity of each person’s imagination – determines what form of expression is given to that revelation. Hence, the Romantics’ “new” and “infinite” realism affirmed the reality of the world, the active reality of the “living deity,” and our experience of the world and, through it, the divine. And yet their realism allowed different configurations, different ways of understanding the stimuli. “You will not consider it blasphemy,” Schleiermacher hoped, “that belief in God depends on the direction of the imagination.”44 Was it “blasphemy”? What it atheism? Jacobi’s charges still hung in the air.

Mysticism and God-talk When Schleiermacher and his Romantic friends said that “one religion without God can be better than another with God,”45 they were not so much denying a personal God as they were rejecting the idols of the theisms of their day – the arid

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

179

god of deism, the projection of a self-satisfied bourgeois society, the first principle of philosophy. In that sense, their reluctance to use the word “God” can be viewed as a form of apophatic (negative) mysticism. They realized, in other words, the perils of naming the infinite, and their preference for terms such as “the infinite,” “the absolute,” and “the universe” was a way of acknowledging the divine transcendence. “Mysticism” is perhaps even more elusive a term than “pantheism” and should be applied with care. Schlegel came to extol “this beautiful old word” as “indispensable for absolute philosophy, from whose perspective the spirit regards everything as a mystery and a wonder.”46 Novalis also frequently used the term and went so far as to call Romantic idealism a “magical idealism.”47 Schleiermacher, however, avoided the term, perhaps because as a Protestant chaplain he was aware of the established religion’s suspicion of mysticism and the association of mysticism with religious fanatics (Schwärmerei) and Roman Catholicism. The Romantics’ experience of divine immanence was an experience of presence, love, power, and awe, and their language reflected that. In that sense, there were arguably strains of cataphatic (positive) mysticism in their thought. At the heart of the Romantic movement was the yearning for the infinite and for union with the infinite. Schleiermacher infamously described this yearning in terms of sexual union. Along the same lines, Novalis remarked, “My beloved is the abbreviation of the universe, the universe is the extension of my beloved.”48 The Romantics’ yearning for union with the infinite, however, was not otherworldly; they did not seek to abandon the finite world or its ambiguities; indeed, they did not think that the infinite was “outside” or “above” the universe. They maintained instead that, paradoxically, the infinite could be discovered only in and through finite existence. This, according to Novalis, is what it is to “Romanticize” (romantisieren): The world must be made Romantic. In that way one can find the original meaning again. To make Romantic is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power…. By endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious respect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite, I am making it Romantic. The operation for the higher, unknown, mystical infinite is the converse – this undergoes a logarithmic change through this connection – it takes an ordinary form of expression. Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Raising and lowering by turns.49

The “lowering” refers to the divine immanence, or divine condescension – the presence of the infinite in, as well as its self-communication through, the finite. The “raising” refers to the Romantic experience of and language about God – the recognition that the ordinary is in fact extraordinary because of the divine immanence. What Novalis termed “Romantic,” Schleiermacher termed “religious.” The Romantics knew that if “the infinite” were truly infinite, “the absolute” absolute, and “the transcendent” transcendent, mystical union is an elusive

180

JULIA A. LAMM

ideal, and language about God is necessarily inadequate. Novalis tended to observe the perils of God-talk cataphatically (indeed, in a hyper-affirmative way): “Three letters signify God for me – a few marks signify a million things.”50 If “God” means a million things, then one thing (one word, concept, or image) cannot adequately reflect God. Schlegel and Schleiermacher, in contrast, engaged in a much more apophatic form of God-talk to stress the point that “the infinite” cannot be grasped, classified, or controlled by any concept.51 Their “way of denial,” however, departed drastically from more traditional anagogic instances of mysticism that were based on a Platonic hierarchical universe. Their Neo-Spinozist view of the universe required different imagery. Their respective methods of talking about God should command our attention. For Schlegel, the imagery was that of a suspension between the infinite and the finite. Only the rhetoric of irony could capture this. “Irony,” he explained, “is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos.”52 Because of the “eternal agility” – because the elusiveness of the infinite marks its transcendence – only “Socratic irony” can really recognize it. According to Schlegel, “In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden…. It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication.”53 The other side of recognizing the elusiveness of the absolute is acknowledging one’s own propensity to philosophical hubris. The new criticism, he insisted, must involve continual selfcriticism. Romantic poetry is thus inescapably an “artfully ordered confusion” and “charming symmetry of contradictions.”54 Hence, the pages of the Athenaeum, the main literary vehicle of the Romantics, were filled with fragments, letters, and dialogues. “A dialogue,” Schlegel explained, is really “a chain or garland of fragments.”55 The imagery Schleiermacher employed was that of a continual oscillation: While intuiting a universal relationship your glance is so often led back and forth directly from the smallest to the greatest and from the latter back again to the former and moves between the two in living vibrations until it becomes dizzy and can distinguish neither great nor small, neither cause nor effect, neither preservation nor destruction any longer. There then appears to you the form of an eternal destiny whose features bear completely the mark of this condition.56

This oscillating movement is part and parcel of his realism, insofar as it possible because of the union of self and world.57 For Schleiermacher, as for the other Romantics, sustaining the relation between opposites – between world and self – provides an intuition of, or feeling for, the infinite as the ground that unites them. As soon as the movement stops, however, as soon as the attempt is made to fix one point, the immediate feeling of the infinite is lost. For the early German Romantics, Spinoza represented this kind of mysticism, this ability to hold together the finite and the infinite and thus to experience

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

181

some kind of union, what Spinoza himself called the intellectual love of God. Schlegel identified Spinoza as “the general basis and support for every individual kind of mysticism.”58

Romanticism, Spinozism, and Pantheism Pantheism is a third way. (Novalis)59 Because you can see no third alternative, and because you will not deify nature, you deify human consciousness. (Schleiermacher to Jacobi)60 The Romantics were not Spinozists in the sense that they carried out Spinoza’s philosophy in its details. The content of Spinoza’s thought inspired and guided them in four, very general, ways. His idea of God as immanent cause provided them with a new way of understanding the relation between God (the infinite) and the universe (finite existence); his realism helped them better account for the relation between the self and the world; his doctrine of the parallelism of thought and extension helped them get around the problem of subjectivism; his stoic determinism reminded them that the human person is inescapably a part of nature. More important than the specifics of Spinoza’s thought was Spinoza himself. Spinoza inspired the early German Romantics because for them he was the avatar of the very idea of the Romantic: The piety of philosophers is theory, pure intuition of the divinity, calm and gay in silent solitude. Spinoza is the ideal of the species. The religious state of the poet is more passionate and more communicative.61 The high world spirit permeated him, the infinite was his beginning and end, the universe his only and eternal love; in holy innocence and deep humility he was reflected in the eternal world and saw how he too was its most lovable mirror; he was full of religion and full of holy spirit; for this reason, he also stands there alone and unequaled, master in his art but elevated above the profane guild, without disciples and without rights of citizenship.62

It is important to remember, however, that Spinoza did not occupy such a position alone. Alongside him were Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, and Plato. This returns us to the question that opened this essay. Granted that the Romantics found in Spinoza an exemplar of almost everything they themselves valued (and in a way that cannot be judged to be historically accurate of Spinoza’s actual positions), were they therefore pantheists? This question is problematic because the Romantics, however much they invoked the name Spinoza, did not talk very much about pantheism. There was the passing reference and occasional enthusiastic flourish, but for the most part when they reflected on the term and

182

JULIA A. LAMM

discussed its meaning, it represented an extreme that needed to be brought back into a relation with its opposite, theism. As Novalis struggled to explain, [T]rue religion seems once more to be antinomically divided – into pantheism and entheism. I am allowing myself some licence here – in that I am taking pantheism not in the usual sense – but understand by it the idea – that everything could be an instrument of the godhead – could be a mediator, through my raising it to be such – just as entheism on the contrary designates the belief that there is only one such instrument for us in the world, which alone befits the idea of a mediator, and through which alone God can be understood…. However incompatible the two seem to be, nonetheless their union can be effected … so that each makes the other necessary, but in different ways.63

Whereas Neo-Spinozism helped them carve a third way, something altogether new, pantheism was understood as one polar element standing in relation to its opposite pole, theism; pantheism, however, was not atheism. For Schleiermacher, pantheism and personalism (theism) are types of representation, the two poles of a continuum of possible ways to conceive the divine. They are “only more general forms, whose realm is to be filled up first with what is individual and determinate.”64 One side of the continuum, the theistic, is necessary to affirm what God is; the other side of the continuum, the pantheistic, is just as necessary to remember what God is not. Both “forms” stand over against atheism, which is the absence of any piety, any sense and taste for the infinite. Therefore, although the Romantics wanted to defend the idea of pantheism, as well as those assumed to be pantheists, against crude accusations, they themselves were not pantheists. Rather than maintain the identity of God and world, they maintained a dynamic coincidence of opposites; they did not so much deny a personal God as challenge fixed and limited ideas of God; and they affirmed the divine transcendence, albeit in terms of divine immanence. In the third edition of his Speeches, written long after the Romantic circle had broken up, Novalis had died, and the friendship between Schlegel and Schleiermacher had suffered severe blows, Schleiermacher explained, “Novalis was cried down as an enthusiastic mystic by the prosaic, and Spinoza as godless by the literalists. It was incumbent upon me to protest against this view of Spinoza.”65 Schleiermacher himself remained true to his own method of oscillation, moving necessarily between the two poles of pantheism and personalism. Piety required that he not stay fixed in any one conception of God, just as piety also required that neither pole be neglected.

The Dissemination of Romanticism In 1798, the same year they published the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge traveled to Germany for a year. Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, stayed in Goslar; Coleridge settled eventually in the university town of Göttingen, where he immersed himself in German

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

183

philosophy and criticism, especially the writings of Kant, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), A. W. Schlegel, and F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854). By most accounts, it was Coleridge who brought German Idealism and Romanticism to England, influencing Wordsworth in this regard more than Germany itself had. We find in their writings similar themes to those we have already explored in early German Romanticism – the coincidence of opposites, a notion of the one and all, a celebration of living nature, the important role of the imagination, an emphasis on genius, an ecstatic element, and a challenge to political and religious authorities. Also, as was the case with their German counterparts, charges of pantheism swirled around them. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth would find the need to repudiate pantheism and even, in particular, Spinoza. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Romanticism made its way, via Coleridge, across the Atlantic and inspired the American Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). In the American context, we again find the same recognizable themes, yet taken up creatively anew. “Nature” schooled their vision for the republic. In the first paragraph of his essay “Nature,” Emerson wrote, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

Notes 1 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Emergence of Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 71. 2 The term pantheism came into common parlance with the publication in 1720 of John Toland’s Pantheisticon (translated from the Latin into English in 1751). Toland first used the term in 1705, in a piece entitled Indifference in Disputes: A Letter from a Pantheist to an Orthodox Friend, which, interestingly enough, was published a year after his return from exile in Holland and Germany. See Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland, American University Studies Series IX, History (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 95–96, 104–105, 117 n. 46. 3 Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry (1799–1800), 84. 4 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 104. Unless noted otherwise, all references to Schleiermacher’s Speeches are to Richard Crouter’s translation of the first edition (1799). 5 Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), 301. 6 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), “Last Fragments” (1799–1800), no. 32, in Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 159. 7 Baruch Spinoza to Isaac Orobio, The Hague, 1671, in Elwes 2:366. 8 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn (1785), in Di Giovanni, ed., The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel ALLWILL, 181. Unless noted otherwise, the text of the conversation quoted here, from both the 1785 and 1789 editions, is from Di Giovanni’s translation in The Main

184

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

JULIA A. LAMM

Philosophical Writings, 179–251 and 337–378, respectively. Excerpts from the second edition (1789), together with Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden and An die Freunde Lessings, are also available in Gerard Vallée, ed., The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002). It had been none other than Lessing who had clearly seen “the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap” (Gottfried Lessing, On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power [1777], 55). The ditch of which he spoke was that between the accidental truths of history and the necessary truths of reason. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785), trans. Gerard Vallée, 91; see Di Giovanni, 191. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism (1787), in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings, 273. Jacobi, David Hume on Faith, 508. For actual use of the term nihilism (“Nihilismus”), see ibid., 519, and the 1815 preface, 583. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Open Letter to Fichte,” 524. Jacobi, “Open Letter to Fichte.” Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations (1787), 173. Herder, God, 107. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 103. See Julia A. Lamm, The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Friedrich Schlegel, “Ideas” (1800), no. 150, in Philosophical Fragments, 108. See Julia A. Lamm, “Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar,” Journal of Religion 80, no. 2 (2000): 206–239. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 82. Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments” (1798), no. 116, in Philosophical Fragments, 31–32. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 101. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 103. Schlegel, “Critical Fragments” (1797), no. 54, in Philosophical Fragments, 7. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 79 Ibid., 203. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 103. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 100. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 107. See also Schlegel, “Ideas” (1800), no. 69, in Philosophical Fragments, 100. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 107. Ibid., 98. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 84. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 102. Frederick Beiser’s taxonomy of German idealism helps to illuminate these complicated philosophical relations. Whereas Kant and Fichte represented “subjective” or “formal” idealism, the early Romantics represented “objective” or “absolute” idealism (see German Idealism, 11).

ROMANTICISM AND PANTHEISM

185

39 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 83, emphases added. 40 For more on “The meaning of ‘Romantic Poetry,’ ” see Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 1: “Schlegel intentionally explodes the narrow literary meaning of Poesie by explicitly identifying the poetic with the creative power in human beings, and indeed with the productive principle in nature itself ” (15). 41 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 83. 42 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 103–104, emphases added. 43 Schleiermacher, Soliloquies (1800), 34. 44 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 138. 45 Ibid., 137. 46 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments” (1798), no. 121, in Philosophical Fragments, 33. 47 See, e.g., Novalis, “Teplitz Fragments,” no. 33, in Philosophical Writings, 107. 48 Novalis, Faith and Love or the King and Queen, no. 4, in Philosophical Writings, 85. 49 Novalis, “Logological Fragments I” (1798), no. 66, in Philosophical Writings, 60. 50 Novalis, “Miscellaneous Fragments” (1797–1798), no. 2, in Philosophical Writings, 23. 51 Here, by the way, are the roots of Paul Tillich’s notion of “the God beyond God.” 52 Schlegel, “Ideas” (1800), no. 69, in Philosophical Fragments, 100. 53 Schlegel, “Critical Fragments” (1797), no. 108, in Philosophical Fragments, 13. 54 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 86. 55 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments” (1798), no. 77, in Philosophical Fragments, 27. 56 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 126. 57 In his third speech Schleiermacher described a third “orientation” of sense, “a constant to-and-fro movement,” which “finds peace only in the unconditional assumption of their [self and world] innermost union; this last orientation is toward that which is completed in itself, toward art and its works” (On Religion, 156). 58 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 87. 59 Novalis, Fragment no. 148 (1800) in Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Berlin: Schriften, 1975), 549. 60 Schleiermacher to Jacobi, March 30, 1818, in Letters, trans. Frederica Maclean Rowan (London, 1860), 2:283. 61 Schlegel, “Ideas” (1800), no. 137, in Philosophical Fragments, 107. 62 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 104. 63 Novalis, “Miscellaneous Fragments” (1797–1798), no. 73, in Philosophical Writings, 35–36; emphases added. 64 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 199. 65 Schleiermacher, On Religion (1821), third explanation to the second speech, trans. Oman, 104.

Bibliography Behler, Ernst. German Romantic Literary Theology, Cambridge Studies in German. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Beiser, Frederick C. Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

186

JULIA A. LAMM

Blackwell, Albert L. Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom, and Phantasy, Harvard Theological Studies 33. Greenville, S.C.: Scholars Press, 1982. Bowie, Andrew. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1997. Forstman, Jack. A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977. Frank, Manfred. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabether Millán-Zaibert. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Hedley, Douglas. Coleridge, Philosophy, and Religion: AIDS TO REFLECTION and the Mirror of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Keane, Patrick J. Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic Light of All Our Day. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Levine, Michael P. Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of the Deity. London: Routledge, 1994. McFarland, Thomas. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Prickett, Stephen. Coleridge, Schlegel and Schleiermacher: England, Germany (and Australia) in 1798. In 1798: The Year of the LYRICAL BALLADS, ed. Richard Cronin. Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1998, 170–184. Wu, Duncan (ed.). A Companion to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998.

CHAPTER 9

Roman Catholic Theology: Tübingen Bradford E. Hinze

Introduction Between the emergence of Aufklärung philosophies and the official imposition of Neo-Scholastic theology, amidst social and political revolutions creating decentralized national and regional bureaucracies and the rise of ultramontanism advancing Roman bureaucratic centralization, and at the crossroad where the processes of secularization and ongoing confessional polemics took place, Catholic theologians in Germany during the nineteenth century were forced to take a stand. In 1812, one group of five theologians was called together to form a new seminary in the predominantly Lutheran (Evangelical) region of the recently established kingdom of Württemberg under the rule of King Friedrich I. The seminary was situated in the Catholic vicariate of Ellwangen in the diocese of Augsburg and given the imposing name the Katholische Friedrichslandesuniversität. After five years, for a variety of reasons, the most telling being the aspiration to actively engage the larger intellectual currents of the day and reach more students, the Catholic theological faculty at Ellwangen moved in 1817 to the University of Tübingen to establish itself alongside its distinguished Protestant faculty. The “Catholic Tübingen school” was the name subsequently used by scholars like Karl Adam and Josef Rupert Geiselmann to identify the theologians associated with this enterprise, with pride of place given to the contributions of Johann Sebastian Drey, Johann Adam Möhler, Johann Baptist Hirscher, and Franz Anton Staudenmaier.1 Although these figures and their colleagues over the first few generations on this faculty are properly identified as Catholic theologians teaching and writing at the University of Tübingen, the question has been asked whether the theologians who taught or were trained at this institution constitute a genuine school of thought. If being a school means self-consciously choosing and affirming the same methodological principles or substantive positions, like Augustinians, Thomists, Scotists, or Neo-Scholastics, then there exists no

188

BRADFORD E. HINZE

Catholic Tübingen school. However, if one can speak more loosely about a school as a community of inquiry, as a context for an ongoing conversation, an exchange among Catholic theologians, who taught and studied at Tübingen, about some common topics, most especially about the nature, identity, and mission of the Catholic Christian tradition and Church in the modern world, then we can rightly say there existed a transgenerational scholarly interaction that constituted a virtual research program that actively engaged Catholic Tübingen theologians. Applying this wider definition of school in the case of the Catholic Tübingen theologians, one should not sacrifice identifying diverse positions in the interest of highlighting convergences of research topics and convictions. Greater clarity may be reached by speaking of two wings of the school. A more reform-minded viewpoint, which combined a robust defense of the Catholic faith with a recognition of the need for ongoing ecclesial reform, doctrinal criticism, and shaping public church opinion on disputed issues, was associated with Johann Sebastian Drey and Johann Baptist Hirscher. A more confessional and conservative orientation, committed to defending the established position in matters theological, ecclesial, and political, was identified with Johann Adam Möhler and Franz Anton Staudenmaier. In this regard, the Catholic Tübingen school embodies and symbolizes the dynamic tension that defines modern Catholic theology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reform-minded wing cannot be simply identified with either the Aufklärung and the conciliarist doctrines of Febronianism, Josephism, or Gallicanism, although they shared certain impulses with these positions. The confessional wing cannot be reduced to a conservative Romantic outlook; nor does it represent a Neo-Scholastic approach which only emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and was subsequently articulated by Joseph Kleutgen, S.J., at Vatican I and by the papal encyclical Aeterni Patris; nor is it to be identified with the fideist doctrines of the French traditionalists associated with Louis-Eugène-Marie Bautain (1796–1867), or a reflection of the ultramontanist position, although they lent credence to a number of these viewpoints. Instead we find a moderately progressive wing and a moderately conservative wing trying to create the conditions for Catholic theology in their own day and age to be responsible and to move forward. Keeping in mind the contributions of the four named figures, Drey, Hirscher, Möhler, and Staudenmaier, we can say that Catholic Tübingen theologians tried to defend the dynamic and active place of the Catholic Church and tradition in the world without succumbing either to the Scylla of rationalism and historical relativism, or the Charybdis of a brand of ecclesial triumphalism wedded to a static view of doctrine.

Theologians and Their Audiences, Texts and Their Contexts To paint the background landscape for the early generations of Catholic Tübingen theologians, one must take care in portraying the struggles of the life of the mind among theologians and philosophers, and natural scientists and poets, that

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

189

marked this period. But no less important are the struggles of the life of the body and the body politic, where judgments and decisions of state and commerce intersected with the realities of church, education, and the everyday existence of friends and families in work and leisure, in living and dying, in trying to make ends meet and tie up loose ends. A hermeneutics of culture must be alert to both ideological conflicts and matters of everyday practical life. In order to appreciate these theologians’ achievement, one must survey the cultural battles in which they were engaged, conflicts unleashed by the Enlightenment, deism, and rationalism, and by the classical, Romantic, and idealist responses the Aufklärung evoked. Likewise, attention must be given to the political and social factors associated with the aftermath of the French Revolution and the changes brought about by the policies of Napoleon that influenced personal, social, and economic realities. The revolution of March 1848 and the Baden revolution of 1849 would result in the state according equal rights to Protestants, Catholics, and Jews and the need for the church to develop a new social form and presence in a modernizing society. The establishment of the kingdom of Württemberg under the rule of King Friedrich I had repercussions for Protestants and Catholics. The defining issues surrounding the relationship between the state and Protestant and Catholic churches had a bearing not only on who rules and on the privileges of the numerically dominant confessional group (in self-consciously Protestant Prussia now with a third of its population Catholic, in Baden with its Protestant monarchs and civil service and an increasing Catholic population, in Protestant Württenberg, and in Catholic Bavaria), but also on how one construed the relationship between the pope and the local bishops of the region, and on a variety of issues concerning education and social policies, including such matters as the appointment of bishops and practices of intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants. Thus, placing the Catholic Tübingen theologians in their proper milieu requires sensitivity to the intellectual issues that defined the day, but these must be considered in light of disputed issues of Church and state, of ideology and practices, that shaped minds and left scars on hearts and souls. A complex context and reality provided the site for creative invention and reception. The relocation of the Catholic theology faculty of the Ellwangen seminary at the University of Tübingen made a statement about the public character of theology. The move placed these theologians in a position where they could be better informed by current intellectual and social developments as they sought to shape discussions going on in the Catholic Church, but just as importantly they sought to make a claim for Catholic theology by addressing the issues being discussed in the modern university and in the larger cultural milieu. Theologische Quartalschrift, established by this new Catholic faculty at Tübingen, has been recognized as one of the premier theological journals in Europe since its inception in 1819. The founding of this journal by dogmatic theologian Drey, New Testament exegete Peter Alois Gratz, and moral and pastoral theologian Johann Baptist Hirscher contributed to the public profile of the faculty and characterized the self-understanding of their mission. “Materials for

190

BRADFORD E. HINZE

the history and evaluation of current church issues” defined the objectives of the journal. In the words of the editors, “Balanced commentary on official decisions as well as on unofficial proposals of this sort lies within the scope of a critical publication and within the needs of the time. And so we shall not refrain from them.”2 The idiom was to be at the highest scholarly level, while the topics covered a wide variety of current interests and concerns, for example, on Catholic identity, revelation, church governance, and church-state issues. In an essay laced with a heady combination of traditional Catholic convictions and piety and certain Aufklärung sensibilities, Johann Sebastian Drey in 1812 championed the need for the “Revision of the Present State of Theology,” which was threatened by sterility and banality.3 And in 1819 he explicitly defined and defended the public presence of Catholic theology in a modern university setting when he contributed to the emerging genre of the theological encyclopedia. This piece engaged the work of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling on issues of knowledge (Wissen) and science (Wissenschaft) and the Reformed theologian from Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher, on the interrelation between historical studies of Christian origins and the history of doctrine and the church, apologetics, dogmatics, practical theology, and clergy education. Not only were Drey’s own scholarly credentials confirmed by this deft treatise, but also it provided a plausibility structure for the role of Catholic theology in just such a university setting. His colleagues and students would not all subscribe to his own particular formulation of the scientific nature of theology, indebted in significant ways to Schelling, nor his own leitmotif of the kingdom of God as the focal idea out of which all others were to be deduced. Yet they would affirm the need to create a theological school that brought different specializations into interaction, not only for purposes of clergy education but also, and here in agreement with Schleiermacher and F. C. Baur, the influential Protestant colleague at Tübingen, because the very identity (das Wesen and die Idee) of Christianity in its myriad historical and communal forms demanded it. The publication of Drey’s three-volume work on apologetics and his frequent lectures on dogmatics further advanced this vision. It is not surprising that one of the favorite sons of the Catholic Tübingen faculty, Franz Anton Staudenmaier, who went on to teach at Gießen and later at Freiburg, followed Drey in writing his own theological encyclopedia (1834) and dogmatics (1844– 1852), but distinguished it by its engagement with Hegel’s vision of system. Catholic theologians at Tübingen from the very beginning earned a reputation for their discriminating engagement with contemporary intellectual currents. The nuances are important, as several examples will illustrate. Thanks to the post-Geiselmann generation of scholars, following the lead of Rudolf Reinhart and Abraham Peter Kustermann, there has been a greater appreciation of the impact of the Catholic Aufklärung on the early years at Tübingen, evident in Drey’s understanding of apologetics, his commitment to ecclesial reform, and his recognition of the importance of forming public opinion in theology. However, it is equally clear that Drey’s work was informed by reflections on the relation of intuition and feeling to reflective reasoning as well as the

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

191

transition from mechanical to organic root metaphors that came to define Romantic and idealist understanding of personal and social formation, development, and dialectic. Drey used selectively the idiom of both the Aufklärung and Romanticism to take a stand against the limitations of its seminal thinkers: Lessing, Schleiermacher, and numerous deists and rationalists. His philosophical and scientific proclivities may seem related to the influential theological programs of Anton Günther and Georg Hermes, but they stood in marked contrast. The impact of the Aufklärung heritage and the practical and affective approach of Johann Michael Sailer is likewise evident in the work of Hirscher, who relentlessly advanced a moral and pious reform of the Catholic Church. Hirscher’s widely received calls for reform later made him the target of criticism by Joseph Kleutgen, the German Jesuit who taught at the Gregorian University and who is credited with composing Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which commended the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Johann Adam Möhler, more so than any of his theological colleagues at Tübingen, rivaled only by Johann Baptist Hirscher in the field of moral and practical theology, commanded a far wider audience and left a much deeper impression, and this within his short life span of only forty-one years. Möhler’s comparative study of creedal statements, written in the spirit of Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) who authored Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporis Haereticos, established his reputation as a critical confessional voice during this contentious social and political period.4 Lutheran Hegelians Ferdinand Christian Bauer and Philip Marheineke were among the betterknown critics to publish reactions to Möhler’s work. Their heated exchange is important for many reasons, including the fact that it illumines the church-state debates of the period. But no less important is the fact that even in the face of Möhler’s influential work, Drey’s theology continued to affirm certain reformminded impulses, thus internalizing a Reformation judgment into the Catholic identity. The reputation of Catholic Tübingen theologians for judicious public engagement with contemporary currents is further exemplified by Franz Anton Staudenmaier’s outspoken political opinions and most clearly in his lifelong critical engagement with the behemoth G. W. F. Hegel, and, in the next generation, by Johannes Kuhn’s detailed response to the influential contribution of David Friedrich Strauss to the debate about the life of Jesus between the rationalists and the defenders of an older supernatural approach to the Gospel narratives.

Phenomenology of Religion and Hermeneutics of the Christian Tradition Drey addressed one of the most disputed issues of his day – the anthropological nature of religion as moral, affective, and cognitive, which was being debated among deists, rationalists, Romantics, idealists, and theologians of all stripes.

192

BRADFORD E. HINZE

He strove for a comprehensive viewpoint. He affirmed the importance of feelings and the “heart” in keeping with the Romantics, and of the moral apprehension of value and of purpose as accentuated by the deists and rationalists, but neither of these dimensions of religion were to be granted at the expense of the mind’s journey to God through intellect and reflection that leads to judgment and conviction. With Lessing, Drey acknowledged God’s work in bringing about the education (Erziehung) of the human race, and acknowledged also Schleiermacher’s and J. G. Herder’s appreciation of the religious formation (Bildung) of individuals and communities through language and history. But this education and formation were not achieved through some rationalist whittling away of the purportedly accidental cultural accretions of historical faith. Instead, he argued that appreciation of the divine pedagogy requires a deeper awareness and admission of the palpable realities of God’s effective communication – the very mediation of grace and revelation in the world of discourse, practice, and institutions – than Aufklärung thinkers and many Romantics would grant. Drey taught physics and mathematics at the Lyzeum in Rottweil beginning in 1806 before moving to Ellwangen in 1812, and he read and kept handwritten notes on astronomy, geology, chemistry, and biology. So it stands to reason that the cultural shift in orientation from physics to biology, with organic root metaphors taking precedence over mechanistic ones, which is found in the work of Schelling and Hegel, as well as in Kant’s later writings, is detected in Drey’s writings as well.5 An organic understanding of history and the church became common currency in the early nineteenth century, and sometimes Hegel’s version of dialectic was included. Lutheran J. G. Herder and Reformed theologian Schleiermacher and his student Johann August Neander advanced an organic viewpoint. And Lutherans F. C. Baur and Philipp Marheineke became associated with a particular Hegelian version of organic dialectic. The writings of Drey, reflecting his close reading of Schelling and Schleiermacher, advance an organic vision of the church and history where parts and wholes, innovative and rigid individuals and mentalities, interact. A theory of collective interaction through time takes shape. Like Schleiermacher, Drey repudiated arguments in favor of natural religion as so many dissatisfying abstractions, by affirming not only the innate inclination to God and a religious outlook in human subjectivity, but also the indispensability of the historical origins and character “the positivity”– of religions, and in particular of Christianity. Drey also perceived a necessary constructive tension comparable to Schleiermacher between heterodoxy and “hyperorthodoxy” in the genesis and development of historical Christianity. But unlike Schleiermacher, Drey took great pains to show the power of God at work in the dynamic nature of the living tradition, in the Word of God, in the scriptures, and in the binding judgment of the official teachings of the bishops in ecumenical councils.6 Variations on this organic viewpoint were developed by other Tübingen theologians. Möhler’s attention to unity and historical details reflected especially his critical engagement with the historians Gottlieb Jakob Planck and Augustus Neander. Staudenmaier’s procedure responds to the Hegelian vision of unity

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

193

(Einheit) in the midst of differences and dialectical processes. Johannes Kuhn’s critique of David Friedrich Strauss’s treatment of the historical character of Christian revelation drawing on Schelling, Hegel, and Wilhelm Von Humboldt offers a further illustration of this transgenerational conversation and debate with contemporaries. Over a period of time, these Catholic Tübingen theologians developed a vision of the living tradition of the Church, oral and written, in Scripture and symbols of faith, that would be widely received (especially due to their influence on the Roman school of theology associated with J. B. Franzelin, G. Perrone, K. Schrader, and C. Passaglia,) by both the moderately conservative and moderately progressive wings of the German and European church.

The Kingdom of God and the Identity of God The kingdom of God, the central motif in the teachings and mission of Jesus of Nazareth, became a focal point for many Catholic Tübingen theologians. Beginning in the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, numerous efforts were made among Protestant and Catholic philosophers and theologians to champion the moral character of Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God. In the wake of these attempts,7 when Drey and his Catholic Tübingen colleagues addressed the kingdom of God, they accented the moral dimension, but not at the expense of larger convictions about God’s primal revelation in the creation of the world, about the identity of Jesus Christ and the redemptive character of the incarnation and Jesus’ death, and about the church in relation to society. Drey argued in his programmatic statement of 1819, Kurze Einleitung in das Studium der Theologie, that the kingdom of God was the original revelation in the creation of the world (§ 27), which had been obscured by sin while also being carried on in Judaism, and ultimately restored as the central idea of Christianity (§§ 32, 58–60).8 Every other Christian idea, every major dogmatic and moral doctrine (the ideal aspect), and every aspect of the church, creedal, liturgical, and structural (the real aspect), must be scientifically deduced from this one idea (§§ 71, 265*). In his three-volume Die Apologetik als wissenschaftliche Nachweisung der Göttlichkeit des Christentums in seiner Erscheinung, which appeared in 1838, 1843, and 1847, the idea of the kingdom of God and its ongoing realization emerged as the guiding impulse in God’s plan (1:342– 343).9 He devoted considerable time to comparing and contrasting the Jewish understanding of the reign of God and the one offered by Jesus; earthly, national, and political versus spiritual, universal, and moral (2:212–215). Jesus’ own identity as the incarnate son of God and messiah are intrinsically identified with him as the embodiment of the kingdom of God. The revealed kingdom of God thus grounds and is realized in the living religious community of the church (1:382). Drey’s scientific construction of theology, deduced from the idea of the kingdom of God, provided a metahistorical vantage point that discovered and posited “the necessary” in the “freedom of history.” His working

194

BRADFORD E. HINZE

assumptions were taken from Schelling’s earlier work on transcendental idealism and the university, not his later views on freedom and revelation.10 “The realization of the kingdom of God in humanity” was chosen by Hirscher as the subtitle of his three-volume work Die christliche Moral, which was reprinted five times between 1835 and 1851.11 In utilizing the leitmotif of the kingdom of God and love as the moral power that realizes the moral order of the world, Hirscher followed his senior colleague Drey (Drey 1819, § 264). They both affirmed the reign of God as realized in creation and in history, and in the human subject and in society. Hirscher likewise committed himself to Drey’s view of moral theology as a transposed (umgewandte) dogmatics (vol. 1, § 3), in the interest of showing the deep interpenetration of these two enterprises, even though he was not committed to Drey’s particular vision of scientific construction, and his work was far more practical and concrete in design and execution. Hirscher’s book on Christian morals was published three years before Drey’s first volume of his apologetic appeared. They could have been viewed as companion works. What stands out are the care and detail with which Hirscher works through the reign-of-God motif in terms of the various levels of the personal moral subject and the church in the world. Here Hirscher in fact goes beyond Drey in showing how the kingdom of God is a divine reality that takes on human form in praxis. The first volume contrasted the kingdom of God as the realm of heavenly spirits and the kingdom of Satan based on a prehistorical fall of humans as the source of evil. The second volume is devoted to the kingdom realized in human life, in the universal human powers of truth, freedom, conscience, and heart, and in special, individual powers. This realization of God’s kingdom illuminates God’s work as the creator of human beings and its fulfillment in the work of Jesus Christ. The third volume sets in motion these principles: the reign of God and the reign of Satan are realized in opposite ways in individuals and communities, as love versus evil. But even evil can be transformed into good and the reign of God has the power to be realized internally in love of God, self, and other, and externally in the church and the state. Hirscher’s attention to biblical categories and narratives in his treatment of the economy of salvation, his popular catechism, and his interest in liturgical reforms demonstrate his pastoral and practical orientation in promoting the formation of Christian character and community through education. The kingdom of God was also the central motif in Drey’s lectures on dogmatics, which he delivered on numerous occasions (Ellwangen first in 1812 and at Tübingen beginning in 1818), but they were not published until long after his death.12 In these he followed through on his earlier plan, stated in the Kurze Einleitung: to construct a dogmatic theology, deducing every doctrine from the historical idea of the kingdom of God unfolding “as a drama before our eyes of faith.” This drama has four main acts: (1) the creation of the world and God’s providence; (2) human sin and evil that threaten the plan of God’s reign; (3) Jesus Christ, who mediates a conversion from sin and fulfills creation, and the church that continues to mediate this salvation until the end of the world; and (4) the second coming of Christ, the end of the world, and the last judgment.

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

195

Although Drey’s dogmatic lectures were not published during his lifetime, one of his students, Staudenmaier, did follow through on Drey’s original plan to publish a dogmatics governed by the category of the kingdom of God. First in 1837 Staudenmaier gave considerable attention to the kingdom-of-God motif in a book which he dedicated to Drey entitled Geist der göttlichen Offenbarung oder Wissenschaft der Geschichtsprinzipien des Christentums. Staudenmaier’s four-volume Die christliche Dogmatik (1844–1852), in the spirit of his mentor Drey, to whom he also dedicated this work, returned to the centrality of the idea of the kingdom of God and the Trinity. His basic approach to dogmatics followed the deep structure of Drey’s lectures. However, his increasing emphasis on the freedom of the tri-personal God at work in the realization of the kingdom of God, a theme which emerged over the course of his lifelong engagement with Hegel’s philosophy, stands in contrast to Drey’s accent on necessity in the deduction of the various dogmatic topics from the central idea of the kingdom of God.13 A three-dimensional theology of the kingdom of God thus came into focus among the Catholic Tübingen theologians: in Drey’s apologetics, in Hirscher’s moral theology, and in Drey’s and Staudenmaier’s dogmatics. This legacy has received considerable attention and respect by subsequent generations of theologians, and it has been carried on in important strands of contemporary Catholic theology.14 Johann Adam Möhler, in contrast to his colleagues Drey, Hirscher, and Staudenmaier, rarely commented on Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God in his lectures on church history and in his numerous writings.15 Instead, the twenty-nine-year-old Möhler concentrated initially on the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the individual and the life of the Church in his first major publication, Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Prinzip des Katholizismus dargestellt im Geiste der Kirchenväter der ersten drei Jahrhunderte (1825). The book made quite an impression for its breadth of vision and depth of conviction. With the publication of Athanasius der Grosse und die Kirche seiner Zeit, besonders im Kampfe mit dem Arianismus (1827), Möhler made a significant shift in his governing orientation, from a Spirit-centered approach to a resolutely Christocentric one – in fact, a specifically incarnational orientation, which made its clearest manifestation in his Symbolik oder Darstellung der dogmatischen Gegesätze der Katholiken und Protestanten nach ihren öffentlichen Bekenntnisschriften (1832).16 This latter work concentrated on ecclesial issues and confessional differences (concentrating on anthropological disagreements about creation, sin, justification, faith and good works, as well as disputes about the sacraments and the church). Möhler’s shifting attention to God’s identity, first as Spirit, and later as the Incarnate Son of God, proved immensely influential at Tübingen among his Catholic colleagues and students, as is evident in the works of Drey,17 Staudenmaier, and Kuhn. And as the nineteenth century wore on, Möhler’s new Christocentric orientation influenced and found affinities with ever larger circles of theologians, including those associated with the Roman School of theology, who were the architects of Neo-Scholastic theology, and those associated with ultramontanism.

196

BRADFORD E. HINZE

In addition to the shifting interests in pneumatology and Christology, increasing work on the doctrine of the Trinity by the Catholic Tübingen theologians can also be detected. “The Trinity and the Kingdom of God” would serve well as a title for Drey’s dogmatic lectures. Drey was less concerned about ontological speculation about the Triune God than he was about the relation between the Trinity and the kingdom and the world. The drama of the kingdom of God and the world is only intelligible in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity. The divine decrees revealed in the economy of salvation can only be understood through the threefold relation in the divine nature itself. The multiplicity and pluriformity in God, the society of divine persons, are the ground and condition for the multiplicity and pluriformity outside of God and especially in the human race, in their communion with God.18 Staudenmaier further advanced a Trinitarian approach to the kingdom of God. Although his particular Trinitarian orientation was undoubtedly shaped by his lifelong critical engagement with Hegel’s Trinitarian philosophy, the primary inspiration for his Trinitarian approach to dogmatics must be attributed to his one-time mentor Drey.19 Noteworthy in the treatment of the doctrine of the triune God among Catholic theologians at Tübingen is their robust defense of the classical confessional and theological convictions about the three distinct persons of the Trinity against contemporary critics. No less significant is their commitment to explore the repercussions of this doctrine so as to address more adequately the very impulses and concerns expressed by their contemporary critics. In their doctrine of the triune God and in particular in their treatment of the work of the creation of the cosmos, these Tübingen theologians took their stand against deists and rationalists, who name God as creator and set God and the world apart after creation, and against pantheists, who too closely identify God and the world. Here, the classical doctrine of creation and providence was upheld, and the transcendence of God maintained, even as their doctrines of Christology and pneumatology emphasized the immanent presence of God in human history and in the human subject. The Tübingen Catholics’ treatments of Jesus Christ, especially by Drey and Hirscher, showed great care in affirming his moral character and impact. But these theologians also sought to defend, and in fact to give no ground on, the classic doctrine of the incarnation; the messianic identity of Jesus Christ as priest, prophet, and king; the sacrificial character of Jesus’ death; the resurrection; and even miracles and prophecies. Jesus is revered as the God-man, as the incarnate son of God. By the time David Friedrich Strauss enters the scene (Leben Jesu, or The Life of Jesus, 1835–1836), there is no doubt among Catholic Tübingen theologians that the confessional cannot be pitted against the historical as myth against fact; rather, there is a quest for a deeper interpretation of the New Testament texts and traditions that can do justice to the historical and literary character of the documents without sacrificing the doctrinal claims of the church. The treatment of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit at Tübingen merits special attention. On the one hand, the early work of Drey, Möhler, and Staudenmaier

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

197

gave special attention to the role of the Spirit in the life of the individual Christian and the life of the church. Here the significance of their engagement with the contributions of Schleiermacher in the Glaubenslehre and, for Staudenmaier, most explicitly with the achievement of Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the Encyclopedia, and in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, should not be diminished, but it dare not be overdrawn. For every common formula about Geist at work in the self, in history, and in society and the Geist forming the Gemeingeist of the church, there are clear statements resisting the reduction of the Holy Spirit to the human spirit or the common spirit of the community; pantheistic and Sabellian impulses in both Schleiermacher’s and Hegel’s positions were targeted for criticism. What specifically is said about the Trinity? One can begin with Möhler’s rejection of Schleiermacher’s treatment of the Trinity for being Sabellian. To this must be added his contention that all Protestants, not only the Anabaptist wing but also Lutherans and Reformed Christians, added to the material principle of the Reformation, sola fide, and the formal principle, sola scriptura, a principle of solo sancto spiritu. The result, he argued, was that Protestants were unable to appreciate the implications of the doctrine of the incarnation in their anthropology, sacramental theology, and ecclesiology. One could infer from Möhler’s attack that the doctrine of the Trinity was in jeopardy. For their parts, instead of accusing Möhler of emphasizing the incarnation at the expense of pneumatology, which some Orthodox and Catholic theologians in the twentieth century have suggested, his contemporary Lutheran theologians Philipp Marheinecke and F. C. Baur charged Möhler and Catholics generally with being followers of Eutyches, that is, monophysites, who emphasized the unity of the divine and human natures in Jesus Christ at the expense of the distinction of natures, to the detriment of his humanity. We will return to this accusation later. Staudenmaier devoted considerable attention to the doctrine of the Trinity. One might argue that he simply built on the accomplishments and impulses of Drey’s dogmatic lectures, while critically engaging the position of Hegel, but this would fail to give him credit for following through on the challenge posed by Drey’s dogmatics: to think through the idea of the reign of God in terms of the Trinitarian faith. Staudenmaier wrote an early essay on the pragmatism of the Spirit, and his dogmatics offered a substantive discussion of the doctrine of the Spirit. Under the influence of Drey, he affirmed the significance of creation as the Uroffenbarung of God the source of all. Following Möhler, his approaches to creation and to the work of the Spirit in the individual and the community were governed by a Christocentric orientation. But Staudenmaier strenuously defended the freedom of the tri-personal God against Hegel’s position, which he feared was a deterministic and Sabellian version of the Trinity that sacrificed the distinctions of persons in the interest of a false unity. What was needed was a full recognition of the character of divine freedom in the three-personed God, the perichoretic, dynamic, and creative character of these relations, and of their unity.

198

BRADFORD E. HINZE

The Anthropological Battleground For these Tübingen theologians, every conflict of thought during this period was fought in terms of anthropology: with the Reformation traditions about creation and sin, with modern deists and rationalists about the religious character of the human, and increasingly with a modern liberal understanding of freedom that became associated with the secularized nation-state and the economic sphere. Sometimes it seems that all four of these theologians intentionally chose this as the defining locus. However, it is probably more accurate to say that this topic chose them, for here was the unavoidable crossroads for all the contested issues between Catholics, Protestants, and modern philosophies and social currents. Drey contributed, on the one hand, a great appreciation for God’s work in the creation of the human person, which was brought to completion in and through the gift of the grace in the Incarnate son of God and through the Spirit. On the other hand, his appreciation for the dignity of the human person through creation included an acknowledgment of a religious dimension at the core of the human person, a religious a priori one might say, that can only be realized through the free acceptance of revelation in faith. Consequently, in his response to rationalists Drey offered not a dialectical approach to faith and reason, but a harmonious and correlative one. Möhler concentrated on anthropology in his comparative symbolics. He advanced a discriminating defense of the Catholic statements on original sin and grace issued at the Council of Trent. Without denying the effect of original sin on individuals, he affirmed the dignity of human reason and freedom in sinful humanity, which through the gift of grace can cooperate with God in the work of justification and sanctification. His own analysis and assessment of classical Protestant anthropology suggested connections to modern Aufklärung anthropologies. At one level, Staudenmaier continues the work of Möhler; however, he is credited with developing a distinctively Trinitarian anthropology. The human person is created as an imago trinitatis, which means that the differentiating and unifying character of the human person is only realized in and through the tri-personal freedom of the Triune God. The distinctive achievement of Staudenmaier has been pointed out by many noteworthy scholars, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, who confessed that it was Staudenmaier’s particular achievement on this point that played a crucial role in the formulation of his own proposed Trinitarian approach to divine freedom and human freedom united in love, over against the determinism of Hegel and the Promethean and Gnostic impulses in the anthropocentrism of the modern world.20

The Essence of Catholicism: Living Tradition, Incarnational Church The identity of Catholicism, “the essence” (das Wesen) in Drey’s words, concerns for these theologians the visible, physical, and institutional character of the Church and the living dynamic character of tradition. What subsequent generations of

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

199

Catholic theologians would describe in terms of the Church as Corpus Christi, sacramental, and communio was articulated in terms of the kingdom of God and the incarnation of Jesus Christ. For Drey, not only is the kingdom of God the dominant motif of Jesus’ teachings, but also Jesus Christ represents the very embodiment of this kingdom, and derivatively, the Church provides the mediation of the kingdom of God. “Christ, who universally effects [the kingdom of God’s] recognition, is for that reason also the visible head of the kingdom, just as its visible presentation and sensitive perception is the Church” (KE §32). Möhler’s early Spirit-centered and his subsequent Incarnation-centered ecclesiology supported a close identification of the physical, visible, and institutional Church with God. It was the identity of the divine and the human that concerned him (earlier in terms of the Holy Spirit and the body, and later in terms of the two natures in the Incarnate Son), more so than the differences. His treatment of the Spirit at the origin of the life of faith of the individual and of the community offered an alternative to Drey’s (and Hirscher’s and Staudenmaier’s) kingdom-centered orientation. His early work on the unity of the church was structured on the inner and outer manifestations of Christian life based on the Pauline principle of “one Spirit, one body” (Ephesians 4:4). Part 1 treats the inner mystical and communal life of the church as the source of unity, love, and holiness. Egoistic and sectarian threats were combated by a celebration of the importance of genuine diversity and individuality that thrive within a genuine unity. Part 2 examines the outer corporate expressions of unity through personal communion between people and bishop in the metropolitan diocese, in episcopal ecclesiology, and in papal primacy. In the years that followed, his reflections on Athanasius’ critique of the Arians, the Reformers’ position on the church and sacraments, and his own dissatisfaction with Schleiermacher’s treatment of the Spirit as it appeared in Der Christliche Glaube (1820–1821) led Möhler to accentuate the incarnation of Jesus Christ and to speak of the church as an ongoing incarnation. This resulted in Möhler advancing a Christocentric justification for the institution of the character of the church, sacraments, and offices. The influence of Möhler’s shift to a stronger incarnational argument can be detected in the later work of Drey, Hirscher, and Staudenmaier, while Johannes Kuhn’s theology reflects this governing orientation. Drey in 1819 described Catholic Christianity as a living tradition, eine lebendige Ueberlieferung. This attention to tradition came to define Catholic Tübingen theology. However, the differences among the theologians on this topic are as important as the similarities. Drey’s effort to describe the living character of tradition served many purposes: it enabled him to affirm continuity and development in the doctrinal and practical identity of the church. The origins of that identity could be traced to the facts of Jesus Christ, his life and his mission. Growth in tradition should be understood in terms of endogenous and exogenous sources. Threats to the life of the tradition are sometimes internal, and at other times external. Drey’s organic approach to tradition of the church fostered a long view of the church and thus authorized the importance of biblical and historical theology for the dogmatic and moral tasks. Individual parts—figures, events, and

200

BRADFORD E. HINZE

movements—should be appreciated in relation to larger wholes. But in Drey’s hands, tradition offered no justification for a retrospective and rigid ressourcement mentality; rather, it fostered a hermeneutical brand of theology that was prospective and that recognized the need to permit and promote an open forum for public opinion and criticism to be voiced in the Church. Theologians and church leaders had to have the freedom to find their ways between the mobile and the static, between heterodoxy and hyperorthodoxy. Thus, while Drey talked about the importance of oral and written traditions in the ancient world and in nascent Christianity, he also affirmed the closed character of dogmatic statements and the open character of ongoing criticism and development. Möhler’s early pneumatological approach to the church and tradition was based on the axiom that there is mutual dependence and reciprocity between the inner participation in the divine life within a community and outer revelation communicated through the church. He seems to have given priority of importance and time to the inner work of the Spirit in the personal and relational character of faith over outer matters of doctrine, institutions, and hierarchical offices of authority. “Inner faith is the root of the external … it is given before the external” (§ 8); Christian doctrine is “the conceptual expression of the Christian Spirit” (96, 23). During the second decade of the nineteenth century, Möhler gave increasing emphasis to the priority and precedence of outer doctrines and institutions. His earlier axiom of mutual dependence between inner and outer was maintained, but the priority of time and importance changed. In his book on Athanasius published in 1827, Möhler shifted to an incarnational ecclesiology (110, 266, 564) – the incarnation became the prime analogue for understanding the relationship of the divine and the human in the church. This new insight and judgment were expressed in his 1832 Symbolik, where he stated that “the ultimate reason of the visibility of the church is to be found in the Incarnation of the Divine Word” (§36), and consequently the church, as visible community, can be described as an “ongoing incarnation … even the faithful are called the body of Christ” (§36). This formula not only underscored the visible character of the church, but also justified the exercise of the apostolic ministry of the hierarchy infallibly mediating the Word. “The authority of the Church is necessary, if Christ is to be a true, determining authority for us…. If the Church be not the authority representing Christ, then all again relapses into darkness, uncertainty, doubt, distraction, unbelief, and superstition; revelation becomes null and void, fails of its real purpose, and must be even called in question, and finally denied” (§ 37). The sacramental and institutional nature of the Church and the important role of theology in the Church were convictions that united these Tübingen theologians, yet within these perimeters of agreement one clearly detects tensions between the two wings represented by Drey and Möhler. Both Drey and Möhler affirmed the importance of both episcopal and papal authority, eschewing contemporary versions of conciliarism and ultramontanism. Both embraced and defended the sacramental, hierarchical, and organic understanding of the

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

201

church and its divine origin and goal. These were important points of consensus that united these theologians. But recognizing this consensus should not obscure the tensions between the two wings. Drey and Hirscher defended the need for voicing theological criticism and public opinion in the Church. These issues were clarified during a debate about the celibacy requirement for priests. Moreover, even though neither subscribed to the Febronian and Josephinist views (the German and Austrian analogue to Gallicanism that recognized the superior authority of councils in church governance), both defended the importance of local and provincial synods for addressing current pastoral issues. Möhler, on the other hand, fashioned a distinctively confessional approach to theology, and, beyond their similar critical stance toward deism and rationalism, he became antagonistic toward reform-minded and modern attempts to call into question traditions such as mandatory priestly celibacy and the authority of the local and the regional church and the papal office. That Möhler and Staudenmaier published in the widely read ultramontanist journal Der Katholik testifies to these differences. As important and unresolved as these diverging convictions and orientations remained, by the third decade of the nineteenth century a shift had taken place that united these theologians more closely against the increasing political power of the modern state and the social and economic forces at work in society. Their sacramental brand of ecclesiology may have offered an alternative to the critical spirit of the age in the academy and in civil society, but it pales in comparison with the kind of popular religiosity evident in the pilgrimage of 1.1 million to see the relic of the holy garment at Trier in 1844, a stunning display of Catholic resolve in the face of secularizing trends.

Confronting a Volatile Social Situation This first generation of Catholic theologians at Tübingen spoke out on a variety of contemporary social and political issues during a tumultuous period. They witnessed the final demise of the Holy Roman Empire, which had lasted for almost a thousand years, with its ancient form of monarchy and feudal relations, and the rise of the modern nation-states, constitutional democracies, and fundamental changes in commercial production and exchange. The century after the French Revolution of 1789 began as one of ongoing upheaval, instability, and change, due not only to the efforts to consolidate power under Napoleon’s absolutist monarchy, but also to the reforms of the bureaucratic state and society brought about by German state officials and especially the civil servants, and the series of democratic revolutions, most notably in 1830 and 1848. In this midst of all this arose a variety of church-state questions, and the underlying issue that tied them all together concerned the mission and the role of the church in modern society. Threats and challenges to the church’s mission emerged in the negotiations that took place about the involvement of the state

202

BRADFORD E. HINZE

in educational matters, especially as they pertained to teaching Christian theology in the universities, and also on a seemly insignificant but profoundly symbolic issue concerning mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants. These specific skirmishes were fueled by larger concerns about the extension and limits of the rights of the states in matters of church affairs, such as deciding diocesan lines, confirming or vetoing the election of the bishop, and supervising diocesan decisions and actions. With church property and the financial support of the state at risk, the power and influence of the Church was jeopardized and diminished. As they took stands on these social issues, the two basic tendencies of the Tübingen school were clearly in evidence. Drey and Hirscher espoused a dynamic, primarily positive, and relatively hopeful approach to the relationship between the Church and the state, which combined a certain ecumenical receptivity to Reformation insights and judgments with a clear recognition of the role of critical public opinion about ecclesial matters. Although secularization was not condoned, modernizing currents were not repudiated. Möhler, on the other hand, quite early in his career fashioned a contentious approach to matters of Church and state, and toward Protestants and liberalizing trends, which he saw as connected. His confessional posture took on increasing significance and was more widely received as the century wore on. Staudenmaier offers an important development of Möhler’s position. As important as the distinction between these two tendencies remained, during the second half of the nineteenth century increasing tension between the church and the state and the marginalization of the churches in social affairs produced growing alarm at the social problems emerging. Confronted by these changing circumstances, Drey and Hirscher also became more cautious, and in their later careers advocated a stronger stance of the Church against the secularizing impact of the state and social life, while Staudenmaier’s voice grew shrill.21 In an early text, Drey framed the issue of the church’s relation to society first historically, second as the realization of the Christian idea (doctrine), and third practically. Historically, Drey claimed that the social and political history of effects of Christianity merited serious attention in theology. Christianity, he held, has left its mark on civic life and organizations. It has undermined narrow brands of nationalism and has contributed to the breakup of the old universal monarchies (KE §187). Moreover, it has influenced states and laws, “and has altered the situation of particular classes, estates, and corporations within the state, or even helped to form new ones, and … influence … constitutions and [social] forms in general” (§ 188). As the concrete realization of Christian doctrine, the church and the state must be viewed as two separate realities side by side, neither above, nor below. There is no theoretical resolution of the opposition of church and state, only the policies of individual churches and states. Still, general features of both church and state can be isolated. There need not be hostility, but the church’s stand to all states and societies must be viewed in relation to the central idea of the kingdom of God. “The Christian church and the state are thus related as a

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

203

universal human reality and a national one, as a heavenly reality and an earthly one. Both ideas are interdependent but neither eliminates the other, rather, both stand side by side, though one is unattainable by the other” (§§ 298–307, at 301). The church has the right to be totally independent from and protected by the state in its internal and external policy; a violation of this right is tyranny. But the state also has the right to protect itself against the church by means of police force and punishment, even though the limits of such actions must be determined (§§ 303, 306). In his treatment of practical theology, Drey claims that the church must protect “those goals [of the church] from any obstacle arising from the church’s position over against the state” (§ 332). He also discusses what should happen if the boundaries of either the church or the state are transgressed by one or the other (§§ 345–349). Beginning in the late 1820s, Drey became more alert to the tension between the church and the state, and he developed in response a growing “pessimism about modern society.”22 By the late 1830s, he charged that the church must be freed from the force and power of the state; and the separation of the church and state means that a citizen must be able to be in the kingdom of God on earth and in the earthly state too.23 By 1847, Drey’s melancholy about society was in clear relief as he charged that the original duty of the church is to make Christians out of heathens, so that the truth of Christianity will be received not only externally but also internally, which has taken place slowly in the progress of civilization (3:12). He offers a “surprising appreciation” of the “transatlantic paradox” evident in the constitutional separation of church and state in the United States of America: the church is not recognized within the state, and yet this total separation of the state and the church articulates plainly a “true relationship.”24 Drey later in his career identified the spirit of Christianity and the church with “socialism in its most comprehensive and lofty meaning” (Apologetik 3:4). Christian socialism advances the union of God with humans and humans among themselves and provides the church’s universal ethical mandate. This noble vision of Christianity has been mediated through various political arrangements, including ancient monarchy and the medieval empire. The Reformation initiated an opposite movement toward disintegration by stressing subjectivity and individuality, and then modernity built on this legacy by advancing egoism and the importance of an individual people and individual states. The rise of nationalism and constitutionalism in his judgment inevitably leads to isolation and separation and undermines both the church and society (3:14–17, cf. 3:204). Drey came to accentuate the differences between church and state. Church power, authority, and institution are entirely different to those of the state in origins, purpose, and history (3:198–203). Whereas the younger Drey had stressed the importance of inner faith in the struggle with the sterility of degenerate Christianity, in his later life he highlighted the external ecclesial manifestation of the Spirit in conflict with the “growing bureaucratic absolutist behavior of the German states.”25 Drey’s position had changed: defining the legitimacy of theological criticism gave way to defending the official faith; the dialectic of the

204

BRADFORD E. HINZE

ideal and the real was replaced by a defense of the established ecclesial fact; and rather than championing the value of regional synods, he now spoke of the necessity of Roman authority in beleaguered local settings.26 His later comments on priestly celibacy, now a symbol of a muscular Catholicism, and on the diminished role of the diocesan synod indicate his deep reservations about the power of the state and a greater recognition of the need for stronger Roman church authority. As much as diocesan, regional, and national synods were consistent with his own theological vision of the church, Drey’s later concern about the rights of the state in local ecclesial matters left him fearing a greater loss of the freedom of the church; a general synod or papal authority was needed to offset this national state control.27 His judgment of Protestantism, once dynamically posed and even at times viewed as a needed component in Catholicism, became more rigid and harsh as he identified Protestantism with modernity.28 Hirscher remained far more resolute in his position, even in the face of the harsh realities of the changing social and political situation. As a moral and pastoral theologian, Hirscher had always been more attuned to the concerns among laity and clergy in all sectors of society. He spoke in considerable detail about the relation of the church and the state both in his widely received Die christliche Moral and in numerous other books and essays. In the third volume of his Die christliche Moral, he examined how the power of God’s kingdom operates internally in human beings and externally in the church and in the state. The individual state was treated in terms of law and the execution of the law by the head of state and the civil servants (judges, attorneys, police, and financiers) and the duties of the subjects. The relationships between states were considered in terms of the rights and laws of the people. Hirscher spoke about how the powers of the head of state, of laws, and of the state itself are grounded in and derive from the common will of the people, that is, of a nationality (Volkstum). The Christian state is the achievement of the common will in compliance with the will of God (3:622). The religious observance of personality is the content of this will, and the head of state represents this will as established by God (3:663). Like Drey, Hirscher spoke of the kingdom of God as a moral world order (KE § 264), but he went a step further and advanced the social implications of God’s reign. The world order of God’s reign is established through love and freedom, based on right and justice.29 Citizens should respect, love, and obey the heads of state and civil servants as a part of the divine order. He condemned the idea of the sovereignty of the people, while defending the various types of laws and holding that “the prince or the highest power of the state is fully sovereign and does not as one might expect need control through a parliament.”30 In his catechism, Hirscher spoke about the duties of the citizen that each child of God must fulfill. Catechists and pastors must take seriously their role in teaching these social commitments and conventions. Hirscher responded to the revolutionary events in Germany in 1848 with a sense of urgency.31 He described the social and moral condition of his day, highlighting industrialization, the shrinking of the middle-class artisans, the impoverishment

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

205

of all strata of the populace, the rise in poverty, the increase in the profit motive and of material interests, and communism. He called for the affirmation of the equal dignity of human beings and of their rights, freedom, and common goods. He challenged state authorities to abide by the legal character of society, but more so to foster the Christian ethos. A liberal understanding of the freedom of citizens is insufficient if it is not grounded in moral freedom guided by the truth.32 His was a moral and religious appeal, but now no longer in terms of the kingdom of God. After 1848, he revised his previous conviction concerning what the state could contribute to the goals of Christianity. Moreover, he returned to the question of the sovereignty of the people and said that “the people may choose and install their government, but its office (whether also bestowed through the hand of the people) is from God, and its rule rests in God.”33 The church needs freedom from state interference to be able to fulfill its mission.34 On the other hand, religious teachers of Christian doctrine have a legal duty to work in state schools and state schools must provide religious education provided by church authority. Catechists, educators, and pastors were not to trust in state-supported institutions, but in the living Christianity of the members of the church community which will lead to mobilization in society. As a result, Hirscher rejected the idea of a Christian state and a pure monarchy.35 Unlike Drey, he remained a staunch advocate of diocesan synods in 1848, and he was particularly clear on the need for the involvement of the laity in these synods, “like the constitutional and democratic principle” which is precisely what some ultramontanists feared.36 Johann Adam Möhler has been described as “an a-political church politician,” and in this role he became a firebrand.37 He addressed and rallied Catholic forces around numerous defining social issues. He published essays on the relation of the modern university and the state (1829), and the social-economic doctrine of the Saint-Simonians (1832). During a time when a power struggle took place between civil servants and clergy with bureaucratization and secularization in the balance, Möhler defended priestly celibacy, and he spoke out on the “Cologne Incident” of 1837 where an Archbishop was exiled by the government for insisting on strict adherence to Catholic discipline in cases of mixed marriages, which required raising children in the Catholic faith. These statements are best understood in relation to the social implications of his two major theological works, Unity in the Church and Symbolism, which together stake a claim about the majestic identity and mission of the Catholic Church in the social cauldron in Germany. Möhler’s Unity in the Church espoused a vision of church unity in fellowship, and identity in doctrine and practice, as inwardly evoked and created by the Holy Spirit, and externally expressed and governed by church institutions. The chief error of heresy was egoism, selfishness, and arrogance, which fuel religious separatism and a freedom of inquiry severed from communal moorings. Protestantism was the chief example of this spirit. The beautiful organic and mystical vision of the church presented here may have affirmed the role of the bishops in close relation with the local communities, but it stressed even more

206

BRADFORD E. HINZE

strongly the divinely established reality of the church, its historical givenness, and its function as a criterion for judging. The critical impulse of Drey’s view of the kingdom of God, and the ideal and the real distinction that reflected Aufklärung convictions, is contrasted with Möhler’s romantic approach to the dialectical relationship of inner and outer, wherein the external is the necessary romantic unfolding of the inner, which then guides and governs. Möhler’s early position thus feeds into the emerging strict-adherence approach to Catholic identity.38 Möhler’s critique of Protestant beliefs in Symbolik may have been primarily intended to negotiate historical disputes about the origins of beliefs concerning anthropology, sacraments, and the church, but in fact the connection it drew between Protestant beliefs and modern liberal views of subjectivity and freedom served to bolster Catholic identity among German Catholics, who, in the aftermath of the settlement of 1803 establishing new kingdoms, were increasingly losing ground to Protestants in affairs of state and in bureaucratic society. Alleged Protestant deficiencies in anthropology, Möhler’s readers inferred, could ultimately only be resolved and resisted by emphasizing the divinely established visible Catholic Church and the authority of its hierarchy.39 Möhler’s stance against the Aufklärung Catholic (and Protestant) critiques of mandatory priestly celibacy, and against accommodationist views of mixed marriages, fit together, as even he himself realized, and further solidified his strict confessional view of the Church. His deep convictions no doubt colored his judgment, but they did not blind him to complexity. He was substantive and nuanced in his interpretation and evaluation of any period in history. Moreover, he exhibited a growing appreciation of the larger social dimensions of Christianity, as evidenced in his essays on the history of slavery, monasticism, Charlemagne and the episcopacy, and the relation of Islam and Christianity. This blend of judiciousness and social concern is evident in his analysis of contemporary issues, such as in his treatment of the inner and outer relationships of the universities and the state with the formation of state constitutions, the social and religious beliefs of the Saint-Simonians, and the undergirding reasons for and results of the French Revolution.40 Yet in the end, the cumulative case Möhler made for the visible, institutional, and hierarchical Catholic Church could not help but be identified with the strict-adherence approach to Catholic doctrine and practice, which fostered the freedom and social power of the Catholic Church in relation to growing state and bureaucratic power. It also lent credence to Ultramontanism, on the rise with increasingly virulent forms, even though his own position on that matter was more nuanced, and his move from predominantly Protestant Tübingen to Catholic Munich would help to temper it.41 Franz Anton Staudenmaier’s personal life and career offer a particularly interesting case study of the interconnection between social context, ideological convictions, and theological outlook.42 Financially supported by nobility during his education, he was deeply rooted in the traditional class structure of farmers, artisans, and nobility. Antagonistic toward the absolutism of rulers and princes

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

207

and the rise of the bureaucratizing civil service class, he grew in hostility toward “liberal” revolutionary forces in Germany and increasingly advocated the importance of the leadership of the Catholic Church alone, with its clergy and theologians in the vanguard. His later writings, beginning in the second half of the 1840s, earned him the reputation of being a representative of “political Catholicism” associated with “the politicization of Catholicism and the Catholicization of politics.”43 In the face of growing secularization and bureaucratization, he espoused strict adherence to Catholic teachings and practices, and a pugnacious approach to Protestant and modern developments, in the spirit of his mentor Möhler. Staudenmaier’s 1841 essay “About the Essence of the Catholic Church,” sought to clarify the relation between the church and the state, and in 1845 was expanded into a book.44 The church and the state are two organisms standing side by side, distinguished according to their goals. The divine purpose of the state is based on the eternal idea of law to order rightly the earthly life of a people. The church has the higher goal of mediating divine and eternal life. The church mediates life to society and the state (and by extension to all areas of science and culture) by witnessing to the Gospel of the genuine freedom and dignity of the human person and the right order of society established by God as the foundation for the virtues of justice and love. The state in turn secures and guarantees the freedom and mediating function of the church. By 1851, he could not have been clearer: the government should be Christian, and the Christian who is a member of the Catholic Church is the perfect member of society and should fulfill the duties of his “station” – whether farmer, merchant, soldier, or prince – without seeking to change this station in life. With the breaking forth of the ideology of revolution, and with the French call for liberté, fraternité, et egalité and the bureaucratization of modern society sweeping through Germany and Europe, Staudenmaier in 1847 sharpened an apocalyptic idiom about the emerging chaos and the cumulative effect of the fall from Christendom.45 In matters of church and state, Staudenmaier followed the lead of Möhler, echoing his assessment of repercussions of Protestant anthropology in his discussion of Saint Simonianism, and slavery, and espousing the affinity between modernity and the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. More so than Möhler, who died in 1838, Staudenmaier perceived ominous connections between Protestantism and modern rationalism which reached its zenith in Hegel’s philosophy and, he held, ineluctably led to communism, socialism, liberalism, and atheism. He saw in these modern developments present-day versions of pantheism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism, all false paths that lead to a false unity. What was needed was a unity rooted in the unity of God, who establishes human freedom and personality, and brings about peace and social harmony. This would be the way to reestablish a Christian state and society, through Catholic Christendom and the turning back of the “liberal” revolutionary ethos. Staudenmaier remained the champion of social order under the guidance of the traditional hierarchical clerical structure. The revolutionary events of 1858

208

BRADFORD E. HINZE

challenged that order and led Staudenmaier and some of his Freiburg colleagues to consider moving the school to Switzerland for an interim period. It was soon decided that the move would not be necessary, but because radicals in Freiburg expressed such animosity toward Staudenmaier, he still fled the city and spent time in a Swiss cloister until passions cooled.46 Significantly, as important as social order, organic harmony, and the power of the integrating whole were for Staudenmaier, he remained convinced throughout his career of the power of the Spirit working to bring about individuation: naturally given predispositions charismatically realized. Each person has his or her calling; each group has their contribution to make.47 This position too could legitimate a static social structure and order, with every person in his or her divinely ordered place, but it could also support a great appreciation of individual groups and local deliberations. Like Hirscher, who became his colleague at Freiburg, Staudenmaier advocated German synods. At least in principle his insight into the power of the Spirit fostered both individuation and harmony, both diversity and communion, and held out the prospect of supporting a more dynamic understanding of the creativity and critical impulses of individuals and local groups in relation to larger social forces. Herein was a Trinitarian hope that the contribution of all particular cultures to the catholicity of the church could be appreciated, and the politics of the period, especially evident in the practice of slavery, undermined.48 For Staudenmaier, however, an eschatological novum was hard to imagine, and the Trinitarian vision, which he had long advocated and which could have modeled diversity in unity, dropped out in his church-state writings during the revolutionary period of 1848. His emphasis on human freedom and divine personality near the end of his career found its source in the one monarchial God who is actively working through the one true Church.49

Conclusion In the end, it may not be satisfying to speak of these four figures as representative of a Catholic Tübingen school, that is, if one is looking for a unified method and doctrinal consistency on certain basic questions. However, if one is willing to work with a wider definition of a theological school as a research program with certain animating questions that occupied the attention of a group of scholars, then one can rightly identify these four as core members of a Catholic Tübingen school. Their similar interests are easily identified: the historical character of Christianity; the religious nature of the human person; the public, institutional involvement of the church in the social and political arena; and the list goes on. But just as important as these common impulses and convictions are the deepseated and unresolved tensions between the two wings of the Catholic Tübingen theologians: the one recognizing the need for criticism in doctrinal matters and reform in the church, and the other more confessional, confrontational, and conservative. Here these nineteenth-century theologians offered an uncanny

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

209

harbinger of the very tensions that have defined Catholic theology after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) between the revisionist and reformist wing associated initially with Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, and David Tracy and the ressourcement wing identified with the legacy of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger. Although emphases differed then and now, basic doctrinal, sacramental, and moral convictions and practices were shared, and perhaps most importantly the positions of one group could mature and evolve in conversation and trenchant disagreement with the other group, and mutual learning could take place. These Tübingen theologians will long be remembered for their conception of the church and tradition as dynamic living realities. The attention they gave to the kingdom of God, Christology, pneumatology, and Trinitarian theology became the wellspring for some of their most important insights into the sacramental character of the church and the need to be open to the importance of individuation and tension in the service of the organic wholeness of the church. Their Christological, even incarnational vision of the church, which supported a sacramental ecclesiology in the twentieth century, is complemented by a prophetic and evangelical vision of the church in modern society and world. We are left with this question: can a worthy theological legacy be advanced that affirms the assets and achievements of both wings of the Catholic Tübingen School, while avoiding their deficiencies? Can one support strong local, regional, and international church authority against nationalist or globalizing forces, while still acknowledging the need for theological criticism, the expression of public opinion in the church, and the use of synods where bishops, theologians, and the non-ordained might deliberate together about the deepest convictions of faith and the church’s need to affirm semper reformanda? Can one advance a robust Christology with an equally strong pneumatology without undermining either within a Trinitarian vision? If some of these issues can be addressed, perhaps there can also be achieved a far more ecumenical approach to theology than these figures were able to attain, and a prophetic vision of the church and society that does not sacrifice their strong sense of church identity, even as it deepens the social analysis and concrete practical responses it supplies. Notes 1 Karl Adam, “Die katholische Tübinger Schule. Zur 450-Jahrfeier der Universität Tübingen,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg, 1936), 389–412; Josef Rupert Geiselmann, Die katholische Tübinger Schule. Ihre theologische Eigenart (Reiberg-BaselWien: Herder, 1964); and Abraham Peter Kustermann, “Katholische Tübinger Schule,” Catholica 36 (1982): 64–82. Staudenmaier, a student of Drey and Möhler, is often included on this list, even though he never had a chair at Tübingen. 2 Quoted in Michael Himes, Ongoing Incarnation: Johann Adam Möhler and the Beginnings of Modern Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 39, citing Stefan Lösch, Die Anfänge der Tübinger Theologischen Quartalschrift (Bader: Rottenburg, 1938), 16.

210 3

4

5 6

7

8

9 10 11

12

13

BRADFORD E. HINZE

“Revision des gegenwärtigen Zustandes derTheologie,” Archiv für die Pastoralkonferenzen in den Landkapiteln des Bistums Konstanz 1 (1812): 3–26; and for an English translation, see Romance and the Rock: Nineteenth Century Catholics on Faith and Reason, ed. and trans. Joseph Fitzer (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), 62–73. Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by Their Symbolical Writings, ed. Michael J. Himes and trans. James Burton Robertson (New York: Crossroad, 1997). Eberhard Tiefensee, Die religiöse Anlage und ihre Entwicklung: Der Religionsphilosophische Ansatz Johann Sebastian Dreys (1777–1853) (Leipzig: St. Benno-Verlaag, 1988). See Bradford E. Hinze, Narrating History, Developing Doctrine: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johann Sebastian Drey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Bradford E. Hinze, “Johann Sebastian Drey’s Critique of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” Heythrop Journal 37 (1996) 1–23; and Bradford E. Hinze, “Johann Sebastian Drey and Friedrich Schleiermacher on Theology and Its Subject Matter,” in Theologie als Instanz der Moderne: Beitäge und Studien zu Johann Sebastian Drey und zur Katholischen Tübinger Schule, ed. Michael Kessler and Ottmar Fuchs, (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2005), 53–76. Josef Rief identified sources for Drey and Hirscher in Reich Gottes und Gesellschaft nach Johann Sebastian Drey und Johann Baptist Hirscher (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1965), 19–24. Johann Sebastian Drey, Kurze Einleitung in das Studium der Theologie mit Rücksicht auf den wissenschaftlichen Standpunct und das katholische System, ed. Max Seckler (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2007); and an English translation is Brief Introduction to the Study of Theology, trans. and intro. Michael J. Himes (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). (Hereafter cited in text as KE.) See Abraham Peter Kustermann, Die Apologetik Johann Sebastian Dreys (1777–1853) (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988). See Thomas F. O’Meara, Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982). Die christliche Moral als Lehre von der Verwirklichung des göttlichen Reiches in der Menschheit, 3 vols. (Tübingen, 5 editions: 1835/1836, 1836, 1840, 1845, 1851); and see Josef Rief, “Johann Sebastian Drey und Johann Baptist Hirscher. Gemeinsamkeiten–Abhängigkeiten–Inspirationen,” in Revision der Theologie – Reform der Kirche: Die Bedeutung des Tübinger Theologen Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853) in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Abraham Peter Kustermann (Würzburg: Echter, 1994), 150–170; and Hermann Josef Pottmeyer, “Kingdom of God – Church – Society: The Contemporary Relevance of Johan Baptist Hirscher, Theologian of Reform,” in The Legacy of the Tübingen School: The Relevance of Nineteenth-Century Theology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Donald J. Dietrich and Michael J. Himes (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 144–155. Johann Sebastian Drey, Praelectiones Dogmaticae 1815–1834 gehalten zu Ellwangen und zu Tübingen, 2 vols., ed. Max Seckler (Tübingen: Franke Verlag, 2003); also see Wayne Fehr, The Birth of the Catholic Tübingen School: The Dogmatics of Johann Sebastian Drey (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981). A comparison of Drey and Staudenmaier is offered by Walter Kasper, “Verständnis der Theologie damals und heute,” in Glaube und Geschichte (Mainz: Grünewald, 1970), 9–32.

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

211

14 See Max Seckler, “Das Reich-Gottes-Motiv in den Anfängen der Katholischen Tübinger Schule (J. S. Drey und J. B. Hirscher),” Theologische Quartalshrift (ThQ) 168 (1988): 257–282; and the kingdom of God motif receives special attention by Max Seckler and Hermann Josef Pottmeyer in Handbuch der Fundamentaltheologie, ed. Walter Kern, Hermann J. Pottmeyer, and Max Seckler, 4 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1985–1988), 3:212–241; 4:373–413, 4:451–514. 15 See Johann Adam Möhler, Unity in the Church or The Principle of Catholicism Presented in the Spirit of the Church Fathers of the First Three Centuries, trans. and intro. Peter C. Erb (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 223, 342–343; and Josef Rief, Reich Gottes, 204–213. 16 On Möhler’s shift from a Christ-centered to a Spirit-centered orientation, see Bradford E. Hinze, “The Holy Spirit and Catholic Tradition: The Legacy of Johann Adam Möhler,” in Dietrich and Himes, The Legacy of the Tübingen School, 75–94; also see the in-depth study in Himes, Ongoing Incarnation. 17 The Grundidee of Christianity shift to the incarnation from the kingdom of God in Drey’s Die Apologetik als wissenschaftliche Nachweisung der Göttlichkeit des Christentum des Christentums in seiner Erscheinung (Mainz: Fl. Kupferberg, vol. 1, 1838 [2nd ed., 1844], vol. 2, 1843 [2nd ed., 1847], vol. 3, 1847; reprint of the 1st ed., Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1967), 2:v–vii, 2:239–240. 18 Rief, Reich Gottes, 106–119, 107. 19 See Bradford E. Hinze, “Tracing Trinity in Tradition: The Achievement of Franz Anton Staudenmaier,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte / Journal for the History of Modern Theology 8 (2001): 34–57. 20 Peter Hünermann, Trinitarische Anthropologie bei Franz Anton Staudenmaier (Freibgurg in Breisau: Karl Alber, 1962); A. Burkhardt, Der Mensch – Gottes Ebenbild und Gleichnis: Ein Beitrag zur dogmatischen Anthropologie F. A. Staudenmaier (Freiburg: Herder, 1962); and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 2:316–334, esp. 2:331–334. 21 See Anton van Harskamp, Theologie: Text im Kontext: Auf der Suche nach der Methode ideologiekritischer Analyse der Theologie, illustriert an Werken von Drey, Möhler und Staudenmaier, trans. H. Meyer-Wilmes and A. Blome (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2000); and Anton van Harskamp, “ ‘Revision’! – Welche Revision? Ideologiekritisches zum theologischen Projekt Dreys” in Kustermann, Revision der Theologie – Reform der Kirche, 60–91. 22 Rief, Reich Gottes, 314–321, 327–328. 23 Apologetik, vol. 1, 1st ed., 96–97, 2nd ed., 89–90. 24 Peter Hünermann, “Soziale und politische Orientierung des Katholizismus im Werk der Älteren Tübinger Sysetmatiker,” in Theologie und Sozialethik im Spannungsfeld der Gesellschaft, ed. Albrecht Langner (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1974), 33–59, 37, n. 15; and Apologetik 3:207, 209. 25 van Harskamp “ ‘Revision!’ – Welche Revision?” 67. 26 See Johann Sebastian Drey, “Von der Landesreligions und der Weltreligion,” ThQ 9 (1827): 234–274, 391–435; and Johann Sebastian Drey, “Über die Anwendung weltlicher Regierungsweisen auf die Regierung der Kirche” (1831), in Revision von Kirche und Theologie. Drei Aufsätze, ed. Franz Schupp (Darmstadt, 1971), 57–97. Compare the later statements on church governance in vols. 1 and 3 of his Apologetik.

212

BRADFORD E. HINZE

27 Harskamp, “ ‘Revision!’ – Welche Revision?” 68, 87–88; and Rudolf Reinhardt, “Neue Quellen zu Leben und Werk von Johann Sebastian Drey,” in Tübinger Theologen und ihre Theologie, ed. Rudolf Reinhardt (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977), 117–166, esp. 151–166. Drey’s later essay (“Was ist in unserer Zeit von Synoden zu erwarten?” ThQ 16 [1834]: 203–256) was hailed in the ultramontanist journal Der Katholik in 1858 as offering a “prophetic warning” (see Reinhardt, “Neue Quellen,” 134). 28 John Thiel, “Naming the Heterodox: Interconfessional Polemics as a Context for Drey’s Theology,” in Kustermann, Revision der Theologie–Reform der Kirche, 114–139. 29 Rief, Reich Gottes, 406–435, beginning at 414ff. 30 Hünermann, “Soziale und Politische Orientierung,” 42, 44. 31 Three important statements by Hirscher appeared at this time: Johann Baptist Hirscher, “Die Nothwendigkeiten einer lebendigen Pflege des postiven Christenthums in allen Klassen der Gesellschaft” (1st ed., 1848; 2nd ed., 1849); Johann Baptist Hirscher, “Die socialen Zustände der Gegenwart und die Kirche” (January 15, 1849); and Johann Baptist Hirscher, “Die kirchlichen Zustände der Gegenwart” (March 24, 1849). 32 Walter Fürst, Wahrheit im Interesse der Freiheit: Eine Untersuchung zur Theologie Johann Baptist Hirscher (1788–1865) (Mainz: Grünewald, 1979); also see Rief, Reich Gottes, 417. 33 Rief, Reich Gottes, 419–420; the quotation is taken from Hirscher, “Die socialen Zustände,” 27. 34 Hirscher, “Die kirchlichen Zustände,” 2. 35 Hünermann, “Soziale und politische Orientierung,” 45. 36 Hirscher, “Die kirchliche Zustände,” 27. In 1850, he published Antwort an die Gegner meiner Schrift: “Die kirchlichen Zustände der Gegenwart,” which in part, continued his defense of synods. 37 Walter Kasper, “Johann Adam Möhler–Wegbereiter des modernen Katholizismus,” Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 17 (1988): 433–443, 439. 38 van Harskamp, Texte im Kontext, 388–418, esp. 396–400. 39 Anton van Harskamp, “The Authority of the Church and the Problematic Nature of Modern Subjectivity in Johann Adam Möhler’s Symbolik,” in Dietrich and Himes, The Legacy of the Tübingen School, 192–207. 40 Johann Adam Möhler, “Kurze Betrachtungen über das historische Verhältniss der Universitäten zum Staate” ThQ (1829); Johann Adam Möhler, “Der SaintSimonismus” ThQ 14 (1832): 305–332; and Johann Adam Möhler, “Ueber die neueste Bekämpfung der katholischen Kirche,” Münchener Politische Zeitung (1838), on the “Cologne Incident” of 1837. See also Johann Adam Möhler, “Bruchstücke aus der Geschichte der Aufhebung der Sklaverei durch das Christentum in den ersten XV Jahrhunderten,” ThQ 16 (1834): 61–136; 567–613 (see Hünermann, “Soziale und politische Orientierung,” 37–40). 41 Möhler’s early position on consultative decision-making by local bishops may have lent some support to the authority of local churches, (e.g., Unity in the Church, § 55, 226–229), but it is offset by Möhler’s increasing emphasis on the authority of the bishops and the pope and his resistance to the national impulses of Gallicanism. Still he remained mindful of the need for bishops to remain in close relationships with their local church, and the value of close relationships with other bishops, though never receptive to collective decision-making in the church.

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: TÜBINGEN

213

42 See Anton van Harskamp on Staudenmaier in Theologie: Text im Kontext, 419–547. 43 Van Harskamp, Theologie: Text im Kontext, 419. 44 In Franz Anton Staudenmaier, “Über das Wesen der katholischen Kirche,” in Süddeutsches katholisches Kirchenblatt (1841), 83ff., Staudenmaier offered twelve points on the church-state relationship, which were incorporated into his book, Das Wesen der katholischen Kirche. Mit Rücksicht auf ihre Gegner dargestellt (Freiburg, 1845). 45 Franz Anton Staudenmaier, Zum religiösen Frieden der Zukunft mit Rücksicht auf die religiöse Aufgabe der Gegenwart vols. 1 and 2 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1846; reprint, Frankfurt: Minerva, 1967), vol. 3 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1851; reprint, Frankfurt: Minerva, 1967; nos. 1 and 2 of vol. 3 appeared first in Zeitschrift für Theologie ([1847]: 51–132; and [1850]: 167–363); and Franz Anton Staudenmaier, “Die kirchliche Aufgabe der Gegenwart,” Zeitschrift für Theologie (1848): 295–463 (and in 1849). 46 Peter Hünermann, “Franz Anton Staudenmaier (1800–1856),” in Katholische Theologen Detuschlands im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 2, ed. Heinrich Fries and Georg Schwaiger (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1975), 99–128, 111. 47 See Hünermann, “Franz Anton Staudenmaier (1800–1856),” 120–122; and van Haarskamp, Theologie: Text im Kontext, 447–452, 464–473, 470. 48 Hünermann, “Franz Anton Staudenmaier (1800–1856),” 122. 49 van Harskamp, Theologie: Text im Kontext, 564–565.

Bibliography Dietrich, Donald J., and Michael J. Himes (eds.). The Legacy of the Tübingen School: The Relevance of Nineteenth-Century Theology for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Crossroad, 1997. van Harskamp, Anton. Theologie: Text im Kontext: Auf der Suche nach der Methode ideologiekritischer Analyse der Theologie, illustriert an Werken von Drey, Möhler und Staudenmaier, trans. H. Meyer-Wilmes and A. Blome. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2000. Himes, Michael J. Ongoing Incarnation: Johann Adam Möhler and the Beginnings of Modern Ecclesiology. New York: Crossroad, 1997. Hinze, Bradford E. Narrating History, Developing Doctrine. Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johann Sebastian Drey, AAR Dissertation Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kaplan, Grant. Answering the Enlightenment: The Catholic Recovery of Historical Revelation. New York: Crossroad, 2006. Kustermann, Abraham (ed.). Revision der Theologie—Reform der Kirche: die Bedeutung des Tübinger Theologen Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853) in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Würzberg: Ecther Verlag, 1994. Madges, William. The Core of Christian Faith: D.F. Strauss and His Catholic Critics. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Reinhardt, Rudolf (ed.). Tübinger Theologen und ihre Theologie. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977.

CHAPTER 10

Russian Theology Olga Nesmiyanova

Theology in nineteenth-century Russia was a complex and multilayered phenomenon, consisting of several different schools all with their own approaches and styles. Of these, three particular streams can be identified: the systematic teaching of theology in the academy; the spiritual-didactic theology of the ascetic monastic tradition; and, from the mid-nineteenth century, a new brand of “secular” theology combining elements of philosophy and literary polemics. Of these streams, the theology of the academy was the widest in scope, building as it did upon eighteenth-century themes while at the same time anticipating many twentieth-century preoccupations.

Background: The Eighteenth-Century Theological Inheritance As the nineteenth century began, systematic theology was dominated by three principal figures: Theophilact Gorsky, Irinej Phalkovsky, and Metropolitan Platon (1737–1812). Their individual systems were synthesized by a fourth figure, the celibate priest Yuvenaly (1767–1809), whose textbook, Christian Theology for the Aspiring Saint, was written in 1797 and published in three volumes in Moscow in 1806. Although this textbook was not especially influential in its time, it is nevertheless useful for our purposes, in that it offers a starting point for the analysis of the subsequent development of Russian academic theology. As did Metropolitan Platon before him, Yuvenaly writes about two sources of knowledge of God: natural and revealed. “Natural epistemology” he sees as the basis of true holiness, which then points us to revelation (the “afflatus”). However, natural epistemology is not sufficient in itself, but is reliant on Holy Scripture for its veracity. After this treatment of Platon’s ideas, Yuvenaly then picks up the system offered by Theophan Prokopovich (1681–1736), even to the extent of copying out entire extracts of his writings. In line with this more senior theologian, Yuvenaly considers Scripture to be the single and all-sufficient basis for theology,

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

215

arguing that Scripture’s authority is not to be shared or confused with Holy Tradition. He then proceeds to divide theology into the categories of “dogmatic” and “moral.” “Dogmatic theology” he further subdivides into God in relation to God’s Self (the divine attributes, the Trinity) and God in relation to creation (under which he includes providence and salvation, the incarnation, expiation, etc.). Where methodology continued to change and develop throughout the nineteenth century, this organization of the material of theology remained typical of practically all dogmatic systems. Yuvenaly’s textbook is entirely representative of eighteenth-century Russian theological traditions. He reproduces faithfully the most hotly disputed controversies, for example, conceptions of the Fall, expiation, and justification as developed by Prokopovich, which were so influential in the second half of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. In particular, Yuvenaly follows Prokopovich in considering the imago dei originally to have been an identical, mirror image. This image consisted in the sum total of the natural, primitive qualities of a human being, such as an essential nobility of the mind and infallibility of the will – something akin to the Lutheran idea. Therefore, although the accidental image of God was indeed lost in the Fall, God’s essential image in human nature has remained unchanged. Beginning with this anthropological premise, Yuvenaly then reproduces Prokopovich’s “legal” conception of expiation and justification. Briefly, this “legal” model posits that the corruption of the human mind and will is so fundamental that there is no possibility of a person meriting forgiveness or achieving by their own efforts justification before God. Consequently, the human race is utterly dependent on the intercession of Christ for its salvation, for only his death on the cross could satisfy completely the righteousness of God, thus bringing about the forgiveness of sin without violating the divine sanctity. The necessary conclusion is that justification is through faith alone and not through works. Not to be confused with sanctification, justification is understood as the nonimputation of sin: that is, justification occurs when God acknowledges a person as innocent, even though their sins have not disappeared as such.1 Theophan Prokopovich and other Russian theologians of the second half of the eighteenth century such as Yuvenaly and Metropolitan Platon2 combine conceptions of the Fall and justification by faith – both somewhat Protestant in essence – with an emphasis on the sacraments of the church. Their thesis is that the sacraments are a means of sanctification and that good works are a necessary condition of salvation. This is where they differ from the Protestant emphasis, underscoring the agency of human free will in accepting God’s gift of grace and in living a virtuous life.

Early Nineteenth-Century Theology The beginning of the nineteenth century saw a move away from the previous century’s very Scholastic approach, in terms of both theological system and writing style. By 1810, the influence of Christian mysticism – so-called internal

216

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

Christianity – had spread from Europe to Russia. The effects of this were twofold. Positively, Scripture was now acknowledged as having priority when doing theology – a development which led to the reform of theological education in 1808–1814. More negatively, this pietistic emphasis sparked a new criticism of mysticism in Orthodox theology. A key figure in Russian theology of the period was Archimandrite Philaret (1783–1867),3 the head of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy and from 1826 Metropolitan of Moscow. From his earliest writings,4 Philaret pays special attention to the role of Holy Scripture as the sole, clear, and sufficient source for teaching doctrine. By contrast, Holy Tradition even in its totality cannot be regarded as a clear source of doctrine, for it has a human element which should not be mistaken for revelation. Neither in his earliest writings nor in his famous Catechism (1823) does he ever raise the question of the particular role of tradition when it comes to issues of doctrine about which Scripture is silent: he seems to assume that such issues are simply nothing to do with doctrine, and if tradition should claim to establish some fact which is not contained in Scripture, then is cannot be regarded as true. Rather, he lays stress on the importance of applying historical and philological analysis to Scripture in order to arrive at its true meaning, given that everything necessary for salvation (dogmatic as well as moral) is contained in Scripture and, moreover, contained in such a way that it is clearly accessible to every reader. With this conviction, Philaret took part in a famous early nineteenth-century project: the translation of the Bible into contemporary Russian. This project was initiated by the Russian Biblical Association, who in 1812 modeled themselves on a similar English association with the aim of making the Scriptures accessible to the general populace. This they hoped to do without drawing attention to possible disparities between the biblical text and the confessions of the church. Philaret himself devised the general rules for translation, and personally undertook the translation of the Gospel of St. John. In 1816, with its rules and objectives finally in place, the Russian Biblical Association began the task of translating the Bible, starting with the New Testament. The first full translations were made available from the beginning of the 1820s. However, these new translations were met with severe criticism, both from celibate priests such as Metropolitan Seraphim and Archimandrite Photy, and from devotees of the Old Russian Language, such as Aleksandr S. Shishkov. The root of these criticisms lay in the fact that the Old Testament was now being translated directly from the Hebrew, and so differed not only from the canonical Slavic translation at certain key points, but also from the Septuagint. In an attempt to stave off such criticism, Philaret had written an introduction to the first contemporary Russian edition of the Book of Psalms (1821–1822) in which he explained these apparent contradictions. However, the critical consensus was that such a discrepancy between Holy Scripture and the Slavic divine service books could only lead astray the church’s children. Philaret also had to suffer unfavorable criticism of his 1823 Catechism, whose first edition contained the

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

217

Decalogue, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer in Russian alongside the traditional Slavic. Such was the controversy it provoked that in 1824 the Catechism was temporarily withdrawn, and the later editions of 1828 and 1839 were published with considerable alterations. Underlying such criticisms of the translation project lay a much deeper point of division. The Russian Biblical Association placed a heavy emphasis on the moral and spiritual elements of Christianity, but tended toward a certain indifference when it came to church confessions. However, this position was far from widespread. Even Philaret, supporter of the translation project and widely regarded as the most open-minded of all Russian Church figures of the period, did not go as far as to endorse this yet more “liberal” position, maintaining a certain reserve on the question of the significance for salvation of confessional differences between churches. Hence, in his apologetic treatise, Dialogue between a Believer and a Sceptic on the True Doctrine of the Greco-Russian Church (1816), Philaret writes that even when churches alike confess the fundamental truths of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the expiatory nature of his sacrifice, they cannot automatically be regarded as equally “true.” Rather, he describes two classes of church: those which are “clearly veritable,” that is, which teach what is true and salvific without any admixture; and those which are “not clearly veritable,” that is, which mix true teaching with false human reason. The former category is occupied by the Orthodox Church, while in the latter he places the Protestant Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, on the basis that these latter churches do indeed teach much that is true and salvific, Philaret argues that human judgment as to the saving ability of other Christian churches should be suspended until the Final Judgement. Where Philaret differs from his critics is that he does not regard the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches as flawed on the basis of faulty confessions. Rather, he grounds their “inferiority” in his own distinctively mystical ecclesiology. As he sees it, the history of the church began simultaneously with the history of the world: indeed, the very creation of the world can be regarded as a kind of preparation for the creation of the church, given that the telos of the natural world can be found within God’s Kingdom of Virtue. Philaret then goes on to combine the traditional “legal” account of expiation with his idea of redemption as the recreation of a person in the image of the Son of God. To an extent, he separates out the image and the likeness of God:5 the “accidental” image of God possessed by a specific individual is not the same as equality with the “simulacrum,” the likeness of God. He supposes that the image of God cannot have been completely lost through the Fall, given that we sinners are not separated absolutely from God and can yet find in ourselves some trace of God’s image, preserved as we are in God’s love and care. Nevertheless, given his understanding of justification, even when good works are the fruits of faith and virtue they do not in themselves impute any merit to a person and so cannot redeem God’s image in us. This dual account of redemption is reflected in Philaret’s Catechism, where Christ’s death on the cross is presented both as a complete satisfaction of the justice of God, and

218

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

also as a real victory over sin and death leading to unity with Christ in faith. We participate in the suffering and death of Christ in three ways: through a true, heartfelt faith; through the sacraments in which Christ’s suffering and death are made effective for us; and through our crucifixion of the passions of the flesh. In this, Philaret’s ideas are close to the ascetic monastic tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church as represented by St. Tikhon Zadonsky, who understood salvation as residing largely in the internal struggle against the passions.

Russian Theology from 1825 to 1855 Theology in the academy: The “Protosov” period With the death of Alexander I (November 19, 1825), the era of the Russian Biblical Association came to an end: with the loss of the Tsar’s patronage, the group had to give up the project, and disbanded in the spring of 1826. Even so, there were a number of attempts to continue the task of translation up until at least the mid-1850s: for example, by Archimandrite Makarius.6 However, these attempts received little support. Now in the period 1825–1838, some interesting new theological tendencies began to appear. The significance of natural revelation became much reduced, and was no longer separated from divine revelation as it had been, for example, in the Preface to Philaret’s Catechism (which Preface was also later removed). Instead, attention was now directed to the dogmatic meaning of Holy Tradition and the church. In the 1838 dogmatics of the Archpriest P. Ternovsky, for example, while Scripture is upheld as the principal source of doctrinal knowledge, there is also a suggestion that tradition might be a complementary source. These new theological tendencies come into their own from the second half of the 1830s to the beginning of the 1850s. This was the period when Count Nikolai A. Protasov (1799–1855), the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, influenced considerably the development of the Russian Church. At his initiative, from the late 1830s to the early 1840s, theological seminaries began to teach Orthodox Confession by Peter the Grave, written in the 1640s and translated into Russian in 1838, as a criterion of orthodoxy to measure the truth of various alternative catechisms – Philaret’s included. Thus, to Philaret’s original Catechism were added sections about predestination, Holy Tradition, and church commandments. (Philaret objected actively to the last of these and replaced them with the so-called Commandments of Bliss.) In addition, included in the Royal and Patriarchal Document on the Foundation of the Holy Synod (1838) was a “Letter from Eastern Patriarchs Concerning Orthodox Beliefs,” intended as a leading dogmatic statement. Then a number of new courses were introduced at theological seminaries, beginning with the theology and history of the church fathers. Further developments included the introduction of a course on the Divine Service books, a reduction in the studying of ancient languages, and the

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

219

withdrawing altogether of Hebrew from the required syllabus. This gave rise in the spring of 1842 to a famous “test case,” that of Archpriest G. P. Pavlovsky. Pavlovsky was a teacher of Hebrew at St. Petersburg Theological Academy who insisted on his students reading and translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew original and from that alone. When Pavlovsky had to present a written explanation of the meaning and purpose of translation, a serious scandal resulted. In an internal memorandum to Nicholas I, dated November 14, 1842, Count Protasov insisted that the meaning of Holy Scripture should be explained from the Septuagint only, as this was the text used by the Apostles and by the Holy Fathers. This memorandum clearly illustrates the attitudes of the so-called Protasov period (1836–1855). Protasov writes of his determination to “exterminate” the Protestant influence which he sees as having penetrated deep into Russian theology and church ever since the time of Peter the Great (1672–1725). He contends that Scripture can in no way be regarded as self-interpreting, and warns against a scientific approach which “kills the soul by abusing Holy Scripture” by subjecting it to historic, philological, or philosophical research. He demands instead that moral theology be taught absolutely according to the church commandments as given in Peter the Grave’s Orthodox Confession. In keeping with these ideals, Protasov oversaw in 1848 the introduction to the academies of Dogmatic Theology, a coursebook by Archimandrite Anthony (1815–1879). This was initially intended to be used as a key coursebook for theological academies, but was shortly afterward replaced by the more basic Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (1849–1853), written by another Archimandrite Makarius, otherwise known as Mikhail Petrovich Bulgakov (1816–1882). However, already in Anthony’s coursebook, Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition are named together as sources of theological truth. What is more, they are named as equal sources, having one and the same divine origin and thus holding the same degree of dignity. On this basis, Orthodoxy can speak about the twofold nature of Revelation: “written” (Scripture) and “oral” (tradition), both of which are entirely complementary and interdependent. So tradition is necessary not only for interpreting correctly the truths of Scripture, but also for explaining those truths which are either not set out clearly in Scripture or not actually mentioned at all. This particularly applies to the rites of the church. In another famous work, An Introduction to Orthodox Theology (1855), Makarius demonstrates further how tradition is not only essential to the interpretation of Scripture, but also necessary proof of its inspiration and authenticity. For all the shift in emphasis, Makarius’ dogmatic system still shares something with his predecessors, in that he too agrees that reason should be excluded as an independent source of the knowledge of God. Reason is judged as being incapable of serving as the supreme judge of theological truths: that role Makarius assigns to the church as the keeper and transmitter of revelation. In contrast to very fallible human reason, the church possesses absolute infallibility as a result of its divine origin and the continued guidance of the Holy Spirit. In other words,

220

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

where the school of Theophan Prokopovich assigned ultimate authority to Scripture, Makarius now locates that authority in the church: in his Introduction, he presents the “infallibility of the hierarchy” (the church fathers as a whole) as the highest theological authority. This is a major reconsideration of the Prokopovich school of thought, which had insisted upon the all-sufficiency of Scripture and the different origins of Scripture (divine) and tradition (human). In summary, the major new themes taking us into the second half of the nineteenth century are the duality of revelation, the infallibility of the church as guardian of that revelation, and the insufficiency of reason. Other aspects of the Prokopovich school were also subject to reinterpretation in this period, although perhaps not to the same extent as the thesis concerning the allsufficiency of Scripture. In particular, the doctrines of the Fall, expiation, and justification were reconsidered, with the doctrine of the imago dei undergoing a comprehensive revision. Anthony and Makarius regarded the image of God as being reflected in the very essence of the human soul, in its rationality and its freedom – but they separated out from that the “simulacrum,” the likeness of God, which can only be attained through the improvement of one’s human capacities, the rightful use of reason, and chastity of the will. (Prokopovich himself was not averse to this explanation of human nature, though he tended not to separate out the image of God from the likeness.) Now the image of God is understood as being gifted to an individual at the same moment as the creation of the soul, while the likeness is more the result of a process of sanctification. It follows then that the first humans were created perfect and innocent, reflecting God’s image in their souls, but even they did not yet possess the likeness of God. Nevertheless, they were entirely capable under their own strength of growing in virtue until they should become as perfect-in-likeness as their Prototype. The Fall, then, meant the interruption of this process toward actual perfection-inlikeness. However, even if the possibility of attaining likeness to God has been lost, the image of God in the individual soul has not been lost finally, but has only been darkened. For a fallen person has lost neither mind, nor the knowledge of the difference between good and evil, nor the capacity (however restricted) for spiritual kindness, nor freedom of will. Still possessing all these things, fallen individuals are yet capable of recreating the likeness of God in themselves – and this is where the new theology departed radically from that of Theophan Prokopovich.

The rise of “secular” theology: The Slavophiles The result of this conception of the Fall was a rethinking of the anthropological pessimism of the Prokopovich school. In this new approach, justification is understood not simply as the legal non-imputation of sin, but also as a real purification, leading to reconciliation with and adoption by God. All this is a gift of grace, but a result also of a person’s free choice. This more positive evaluation of

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

221

the human condition is characteristic of the general thrust of late nineteenthcentury dogmatics. In addition, the logic of this new emphasis insists that justification cannot exclude completely human activity, given that it is now linked so closely to sanctification. That is why, according to the Letter of Eastern Patriarchs on the Orthodox Faith, justification is achieved by faith through works. However, despite such a reconceptualizing of the question of justification and the image of God, Archimandrites Anthony and Makarius still held to the same classic “legal” understanding of expiation, where expiation is understood as a matter of satisfying God’s justice. Furthermore, despite all these changes in emphasis, the latter half of the nineteenth century still retained the traditional separation of dogmatics into God in relation to God’s Self and God in relation to creation, just as was set out by Prokopovich. In terms of theological systems, the mid-nineteenth century remained entirely Scholastic in its approach and style. However, what did appear as genuinely new were methodological introductions to courses in dogmatics, so that even so-called basic theology received an apologetic preface. Theology in the academy was now finding some interesting food for thought in the monastic ascetic tradition, as well as in so-called secular theology, that is, a non-ecclesial philosophical theology written by those outside the ranks of the clergy. This latter type of theology first appeared in a developed form in the 1840s–1850s through the Slavophile movement as represented by Alexei S. Khomyakov (1804–1860), Ivan V. Kireevsky, and Yuri F. Samarin, among others, whose ideas then gave rise to a whole stream of “secular” theology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on German Idealism, European Romanticism, and the patristic tradition, the Slavophiles presented a thesis in which the Orthodox Church had attained the highest level of development, given that it avoided the extremes of both Catholic and Protestant thought. “Christian knowledge,” wrote Khomyakov, “is not a matter of mind, but of living and graceful faith.” Accordingly, he criticized sharply any instantiations of rationalism in theology, arguing that although doctrinal truths are unchangeable and have been imparted to the Church of Christ from its very beginnings, yet the reception of these truths is an ongoing process and changes with the character of the age. In other words, revelation is not static, but “the insights of the church in the present time and the insights of the church in centuries gone by together make an uninterrupted Revelation.” In Khomyakov’s opinion, Catholicism had erred by allowing an external authority to suppress freedom in a manner antithetical to true collegiality, while Protestantism had erred by separating that collegiality out into a mere collection of rational individuals. By contrast, the Orthodox Church had maintained both collegiality and freedom, which reside in the church’s potential to unify the faithful multitudes in a dialectical cooperation of community and individual – a unity which moreover is “organic,” given that it is conceptualized as a mystical anthropomorphic body. Thus Khomyakov replaces the traditional stress on the unifying power of the church hierarchy with a new emphasis on the free union of those who in truth and love profess faith in Christ. The church, then, represents an ideal of communality.

222

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

As did more traditional theologians in the academy, Khomyakov places the church at the center of his theology, presenting it as infallible and possessing of sanctity. This is the position of his most important theological work, Experiencing the Recitation of the Catechism in the Teaching of the Church (written in the 1840s and first published in 1864). However, he differs from his colleagues in that he understands the characteristics of the church in a mystical manner, not necessarily identifying these characteristics with the “visible” Orthodox Church of his time, but rather with an eschatological perfection which will ultimately be revealed. The Russian Orthodox Church as it exists now is but a part of this ultimate perfect whole. Ignoring the prevalent anti-European polemics of the time, Khomyakov wrote that the secret cords which connect the visible church with the rest of humanity are not revealed to us. In view of this, we neither have the right nor should we desire to regard all those outside the visible church strictly as condemned, given that such a supposition would contradict divine charity. Khomyakov’s ecclesiology might well have been influenced by the ideas of Metropolitan Philaret, who considered the Universal Church to be the Body of Christ in some similarly mystical sense. However, Khomyakov was searching for a more organic unity and an absolute fundamental principle behind the distortion of Being. Both Khomyakov and Kireevsky betray a certain romanticized pathos in their insistence on a return to origins, an attitude which is particularly noticeable in their Slavic-centered historiosophy and idealization of ancient Orthodoxy. Romantic elements are also evident in the Slavophiles’ criticism of absolute rationality and in their religious epistemology, which together form the foundation of their synthesis of patristic thought and contemporary philosophy.

Ascetic theology: St. Ignatius Although the Slavophiles to some extent were repeating the patristic and ecclesiastic theses of 1840s–1850s theology in the academy, their alternative “secular” theology was nevertheless offering a new approach. In this they differed also from that other strand of nineteenth-century theology, the monastic ascetic tradition. This difference is especially noticeable in contrast with the works of St. Ignatius (1807–1867, canonized 1998), who is representative of ascetic theology of the same period. Unlike most other authorities of the Russian Church, Ignatius did not originate in the clergy and, moreover, had no systematic spiritual education. Nevertheless, many of his theological ideas were included in the academic tradition of the period. Like most theologians of the time, St. Ignatius attached special significance to tradition and the writings of the church fathers. When it came to questions of the Fall, the imago dei, and expiation, he shared the opinions of Makarius (Bulgakov), requisitioning them in his treatises Ascetic Experiences and A Word about Death for polemic effect against European mysticism in general, and against the Catholic

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

223

Imitation of God by Thomas Kempijsky in particular. Ignatius’ critique was based on his anthropological views. As he saw it, there are three states of human Being: before the Fall, after the Fall, and after Redemption. In the first of these states, human nature was not implicated in evil, about which a person had only theoretical and not practical knowledge. A soul in this state belonged to the spiritual world and could see spirits sensually, so that the body was not separated from the world of spirits. However, after the Fall humanity acquired direct practical experience of evil, with the result that good has become so mixed with evil in human nature that there is now no good work which does not contain some element of evil. Indeed, we are sick with sin to such an extent that we do not even know how diseased we are. Through the Fall, our bodies are in the same category as animal bodies, while the soul has become an outcast spirit which seduces our senses with the illusion of mystical experience. Through expiation and baptism we re-acquire the capacity for spiritual vision, which we achieve through selfless devotion to God as we leave behind the passions of our animal bodies and the illusions of our outcast souls. In this way St. Ignatius effectively carries on where theology in the academy stops, supplementing dogmatic teaching about the improvement of the expiated and sanctified person with ideas taken from orthodox ascetics. As he saw it, doctrine is the “foundation,” but actual Christian living is the “building” itself. Ignatius’ opposition to religious mysticism, romanticism, and Scholasticism took the form of a deep existential analysis of the internal life of the soul as it strives for Christian perfection. In his treatise, The Study of Monasticism, he describes how the monastic route is realized through “the carrying of the cross,” both “externally” in terms of corporeal suffering, and “internally” in terms of the struggle against the passions. For this reason he considers monasticism to be analogous to Christian martyrdom, given that both involve the repudiation of World and Self through obedience to God, in total opposition to the secular ideal of freedom. Further, both monasticism and martyrdom involve purification by repentance and a deep sense of the fear of God, through which alone it is possible to come to a true love of God. Finally, both involve attentive and continuous prayer, on which last point Ignatius dwells at length. This striving for perfection, particularly in the face of death, constitutes the most interesting part of St. Ignatius’ moral and ascetic legacy.

The Transitional Period: 1856–1867 With the death of Protosov in 1856, and in the previous year that of his patron, Nicholas I, Russian theology began to change once again in style, approach, and methods of narration. The period from 1856 to 1867 can be regarded as transitional, when “Protosov” tendencies in academic theology were still strong, but changes were becoming not only more noticeable but also more necessary. The first sign of the new regime was the recommencement in 1858 of the project of

224

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

translating the Bible into contemporary Russian, a task which was finally finished in 1876. This took place mostly under the influence of Metropolitan Philaret, who in 1845 presented a paper to the Holy Synod entitled On Dogmatic Dignity: Preserving the Greek Language of the Seventy Interpreters, and the Slavic Translations of Holy Scripture. In this paper, not finally published until 1858, Philaret insists that respect for the Septuagint should not exclude the interpretation of Scripture according to the Hebrew, for the Hebrew text must also be given full dogmatic dignity. This period also saw major changes in the program of teaching at seminaries. Peter the Grave’s textbook was removed from seminary syllabuses in 1860–1862, while Patristic courses were shortened. Then, in the 1860s–1870s, the task of translating the Old Testament into modern Russian was begun, even though the so-called Russian Septuagint did not coincide completely with the Greek or with the Slavic. One of those who opposed the translation of the Bible from the Hebrew was St. Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894, canonized 1988). However, Theophan is more widely known as a representative of the ascetic monastic tradition, which sharply criticized the spread of materialist and positivist tendencies in Russian society. In his principal though unfinished book, An Outline of Christian Moral Teaching, Theophan offers a highly psychological description of the Christian life journey. He does not view the Christian life as in any way a “natural” life, for the nature of fallen humanity is more inclined to evil than to good, and not even free will and a desire for the good can change that. Thus, Theophan speaks of the necessity of grace to awaken us from what he describes as a “sinful dream.” Sin shrouds a person in blindness, apathy, and carelessness; nevertheless, the torments of conscience can make a person determined to devote him or herself to God. This is the beginning of the Christian life journey, which Theophan defines as an internal struggle against the self and the natural passions. As St. Theophan describes it, the first stage – that of turning to God – purifies the human spirit only; meanwhile, the body and soul remain slaves to natural passions, the persistence of which means that despite conversion, the struggle against the self continues almost uninterrupted. The source of this internal struggle is the ontological difference between the human spirit and the phenomenological world to which the flesh (defined as body and soul) belongs. But when God breathes a spirit into an individual, this is what raises him or her above mere nature into a realm which cannot be entered by nature. This spiritual existence is now manifested by holy passions, such as fear of God, conscience, and the will to strive toward God. This three-part typology of human nature is somewhat atypical of Russian theology in general, which usually considered the human person as a two-part structure consisting of body and soul, with “spirit” understood as the highest part of the soul. This was the view of St. Ignatius as well as the majority of dogmatists. Theophan, by contrast, tended to distinguish the embodied and mortal world of the passions from the bodiless and immortal human spirit. The spirit alone is created in the image of God and is called to return to God and restore human nature

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

225

to its unfallen state. Thus, according to Theophan, fallen humanity is restored first of all in the spirit, which then returns to us power over the soul and the body, purifying them both from sinful passions. As it happens, both St. Ignatius and St. Theophan had a very similar understanding of the Christian journey as an internal and practical struggle against the passions, victory to be accomplished by means of spiritual works and prayer. Likewise, they both considered repudiation of the world and the forgetting of self to be conditions of spiritual victory. However, they were sharply divided in their understanding of the ontological differences between the spiritual and natural realms, coming at the question from two entirely different angles. St. Ignatius’ brand of spiritual mysticism emphasized the possibility of direct spiritual communication with God even from within the natural world. By contrast, St. Theophan’s outlook was derived from a “natural science” materialism, stressing as he did the “thing-ness” of the phenomenological world and its absolute separation from the spiritual realm. St. Theophan’s theology is characterized by his distinctive combination of traditional Orthodox ascetics with a re-worked “European” psychology, in particular the monadic philosophy of Gottfried Leibnitz. However, more critical voices where materialism, German rationalism, and Protestant historical criticism were concerned led to the production of a number of important academic treatises, among them several by another Philaret, the Archbishop Philaret Gumilyovsky (1805–1866). In Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, published in 1864 but composed of lectures from the latter half of the 1830s, Philaret Gumilyovsky proposes that dogma is an unalterable truth derived directly from Holy Scripture and subsequently worked out in Holy Tradition, which acts as a kind of theological arbitrator. Tradition should, of course, be tested against Scripture and repudiated unconditionally where contradictions arise. However, the witness of tradition should be joined to that of Scripture, particularly where the meaning of the words of Scripture is subject to dispute. In the three-volume Historical Teachings of the Church Fathers (1859), Philaret Gumilyovsky asserts that the Holy Fathers explain the Word of God in a true sense, and thus guard against false teachings. However, given that the Holy Fathers, unlike the apostles, are subject to the Zeitgeist and so can be mistaken, they must be read against the Word of God in Scripture as the contemporary church understands it. In this way Philaret Gumilyovsky formulated a conception of the harmonious combination of Scripture and tradition which has been the general outlook of Russian theology since the 1860s. As a result, the main focus ever since has been on the historical development of church and dogma, which is understood as the condition both for an authentic understanding of Scripture and for the very existence of the arbitrator, tradition. Importantly, Philaret Gumilyovsky does not consider tradition to be absolute, unchangeable, and self-verifying. Rather, he introduces an element of historical analysis into his dogmatic teachings, supposing that the church did not present the dogmas of faith in an equally complete way in all eras, but that it always did adapt them somewhat to the

226

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

needs of believers in a particular historical context. However, Philaret Gumilyovsky does not consider such shifts in dogma to be especially significant, arguing that they affect only the subjective and human aspect of dogma and leave the divine aspect untouched. These shifts in theological emphases were reflected in new charters drawn up for seminaries in 1867, and for academies in 1869, both of which the other Philaret (Drozdov), the by-now frail Metropolitan of Moscow, helped prepare. These new charters set out a methodological reform in Orthodox dogmatics, placing them side by side with the study of the history of dogma. This reform marks a transition from the earlier Scholastic “systems” of theology to historical analysis – a move which had been anticipated to some extent by Western European historical criticism and the ideas of the Slavophiles. Now in St. Petersburg Theological Academy could be found a teacher such as A. L. Katansky (1836–1919), who in his article “On the Historical Narration of Dogmas” (1871) proposed that although dogmas reveal an unchangeable truth, nevertheless the historic formulations and terminology of the church can be changed, given that not even the most perfect form of words can correlate exactly with the divine idea. Even more instructive in respect of methodology is the book Dogmatics by Archimandrite Silvestr (1828–1908). Silvestr follows strictly the usual historical and methodological approach, sticking to the same general categories of God in relation to God’ self and God in relation to the world. Like his predecessors, Silvestr asserts the necessity of complementing Holy Scripture with Holy Tradition on such issues on which Scripture is silent. If this is done within the context of the governance of the church, then these dogmas, far from being “dead,” contain within their own essence the dialectic that exists between their absolute and eternal content and their historically conditioned form. Dogma, then, is more even than the indisputable and unchangeable rule of faith: it is, crucially, the beginning of a true spiritual life journey as opposed to dry Scholastic immobility.

Russian Theology from 1868 to the Beginnings of the Twentieth Century Literary influences on “secular” theology As the century progressed, “secular” theology continued in its established antiScholastic vein, concentrating now with peculiar genius and force on Christology and anthropology. The field of secular theology in the latter part of the century was populated mostly by literary figures, philosophers, and publicists, who presented their theological ideas wrapped in an expressive art form. These included Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Konstantin Leontyev (1831–1891), and Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), amongst others. The theology underpinning the entirety of Dostoevsky’s output is described thus by Solovyov: it is the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ as an internal force, best

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

227

defined as the power of unconditional love and forgiveness, which in turn becomes the foundation of the external realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. (To an extent, this definition can also be applied to Tolstoy at least until the 1880s.) Dostoevsky takes as his starting point the Slavophiles’ idea of freedom and love, considering these to be the distinguishing features of the Orthodox Church. He then gives this idea of freedom and love an absolute religious meaning. Following the Orthodox ascetic tradition, particularly that of St. Theophan the Recluse, Dostoevsky contends that the disruption of relationships has its origin in self-love. However, where the ascetic tradition understood self-love as separating a person from God, Dostoevsky understands it as disrupting our relationships with other people. This disruption might nevertheless be overcome with the help of a religiously understood but generally accepted idea of freedom and love. This theological line of thought, complemented by an understanding of human suffering as a saving catharsis, is noticeable in his novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1870), but most outstandingly in The Brothers Karamazov (1879). Here Ivan Karamazov judges and rejects the ugly parody of sacrament, miracle, and authority, by which the church had raised the human inclination to sin to the level of divinity; however, this apotheosis of human peccability is opposed to the “true” Christianity of truth, freedom, and moral authority as represented by his brother Alyosha. Such a true “inner” Christianity is what will ultimately overcome the injustice of the external world, repairing human relationships with the divine love of Christ. The conservative Orthodox publicist Konstantin Leontyev responded critically to this positing of absolute love as Christianity’s most foundational principle. In his article “A Speech of F. M. Dostoevsky on Pushkin’s Day” (1882), Leontyev reproaches Dostoevsky for what he sees as an excessive religious optimism. After all, Dostoevsky’s faith in the possibility of achieving heaven on earth seems misguided from a historical perspective. Therefore love cannot be the fundamental principle of Christianity: that surely has to be the fear of God, which is the “beginning of wisdom,” which Leontyev interprets as faith. Only fear of God can lead us to humility and obedience, from which true love is born, as both a reward for fear and faith, and a special gift of grace. The artistic output of Vladimir Solovyov marks a kind of synthesis in the development of Russian religious philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. In particular, The Spiritual Basis of Life (1884) is an attempt to consider whether anthropological aspects of religious conversion and salvation have any theological significance. As Solovyov sees it, rebellion against God, mutual rejection, and enslavement to nature have all perverted our lives. Nevertheless, Solovyov sees the kingdom of God as present even now in our lives. This ontological as well as anthropological optimism of Solovyov is clearly opposed to the ascetic tradition in Russian theology. In works such as The Justification of the Good and Lectures on Divine Humanity, among others, Solovyov presents us with a world whose true meaning is found in unity. Humanity’s particular role is to actualize the Kingdom of God by leading this world to a full comprehension of its

228

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

own truth, blessing, and beauty. This ultimate organic unity is made possible by the Incarnation through which the spirit-filled body of Christ brought the fullness of God into the corporeal world. In this way, Solovyov introduces his Christological and ecclesiological hermeneutic, through which he reads world and community. In his scheme, Jesus Christ is known not as the historical moment of salvation, but as a continuing force for the unity of all who are inspired by him. This unity can be seen most objectively in the church, which sanctifies and transfigures the earthly life of the community as it mediates the Christian way of being. However, the originality of Solovyov’s conception of absolute unity is that through the actions of just one individual, the whole of creation can be opened up to the possibility of a “free union” with God, for when in true prayer we unite our will with God’s, then we become one of the links between the divine and the natural realms. The principle of obedience to God’s will is not about observation of the Law, even in its moral and Gospel sense. Rather, obedience should be understood as taking place within the “imagination of Christ,” that is, within the correlation of our diverse wills with his will as we stand before his face and are unified with him in a state of divinized humanity. The moment when such unity is achieved is the moment of absolute human freedom which, as Solovyov wrote to Tolstoy, can be defined as victory over the meaninglessness of death and the chaos of a hostile material life, resulting in the transfiguration and inspiration of worldly existence. The paradigmatic example of such a victory is “Christ is Risen”: the first of all the dead so to arise, “the One who shows the way, the Sign for us of an active, striving, improving life.”

Theology in the academy and the input of philosophical anthropology, 1880–1900 The question of what it means to speak of the divine humanity of Christ, and the related question of the love of God as the foundation of theology, also preoccupied the Russian academic tradition. From 1850 to 1880, these two questions were still a marginal consideration, being developed only by such controversial theologians as Aleksandr Bukharev, also known as Archimandrite Theodore but later defrocked. Bukharev was one of the few academic teachers who approached secular religious literature with sympathy – see, for example, his famously enthusiastic letters to Nikolai Gogol, his reviews of Dostoevsky’s novels, and the similarity between many of his ideas and those of Solovyov. However, by the 1880s, this marginal interest in the love of God as the foundation for theology had become mainstream. To a certain extent this shift reflected Western European disputes about expiation and salvation under the influence of German liberalism. The year 1880 heralded the appearance of Divine Love by A. D. Belyaev (1852–1919), in which these new, existentially oriented methodological principles are neatly systematized for the first time. In this work, Belyaev demonstrates how to build a dogmatics founded on the principle of love, both as an a priori divine attribute and as the basis of all divine actions.

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

229

This reformulated view of divine “home-building” (God making his home on earth) as a matter of divine love leads to a profound reinterpretation of the essence of the saving work of Christ. Now all the actions of the Incarnate God acquire a salvific character: incarnation, life, and suffering, as well as death. Hence Jesus’ death should be regarded merely as the final moment in the salvation process, and not as containing the essence of salvation in itself – a position which directly contradicts the Russian theological tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To put it another way, the death of Jesus Christ gives his life its primary meaning, but not its exclusive meaning. Belyaev even goes as far as to assert that his death would not be a saving death were it not for the public activity of his life, although one should also say that his life without this death would have left the process of salvation unfinished. Although he does not specifically deny Jesus’ death as the moment of satisfaction and reconciliation, he does criticize the “legal” character of this formulation, because as he sees it, where there is love, there cannot also be formal legal accounts and requitals. Rather, adoption and regeneration are effected through Jesus’ life of complete obedience to the Father. Thus the incarnation as a whole becomes the greatest instance of divine love, and not just Christ’s death, which should be understood as one example of that obedience. Divine Love was strongly criticized in 1894 by the priest Pavel Y. Svetlov for underestimating the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross, and also for its apparent borrowings from German religious literature. Svetlov’s dissertation, The Meaning of the Cross in the Matter of Christ, prepared in 1888–1892 and published in 1893, does in fact include some elements of this new “moral” approach, although he affirms the older understanding of the cross of Christ as the actual moment of expiation and satisfaction. Svetlov likewise considers God as love, but asserts that the organic unity within God of love and justice has its paradigmatic realization in this actual moment of “legal” love – as opposed to Belyaev’s treatment of love as a divine attribute. Svetlov maintains the centrality of the cross as redemptive, for he considers that not only does truth combine with love, but it also has its own direct and insistent demand. In an attempt to avoid the extremes of both the legal and moral approaches, Svetlov divides the objective and subjective aspects of expiation. The former he regards as the reconciliation of a person with God through the satisfaction of God’s truth. This is essentially a “negative” process, in that it consists of the elimination of obstacles to the union of God and humanity. By contrast, the subjective aspect consists of moral regeneration, when a person participates in the expiatory sufferings of the Christ by means of the Eucharist and by “taking up the cross” in a spiritual sense. Thus justification and sanctification are merged by Svetlov, who understands them not as a result of expiation, but as part of the process. Despite this treatment of moral regeneration, Svetlov still accords to the death of Christ on the cross an essential role in expiation, thus differentiating him from the more “extreme” moral accounts of redemption which were being developed

230

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

at the turn of the next century. These moral theories were championed particularly by Archimandrite Sergius (Stargorodsky, 1867–1944), whose 1895 Master’s dissertation, The Orthodox Teaching of Salvation, was approved, even though it denied completely that expiation should be understood as satisfaction of God’s justice. Having begun in the wrong place, he argued, Western theologians then proceeded to work out in a wrong “legal” fashion the details of the problem of justification and merits. This entirely wrong conception of justification has its roots in human self-love, which thirsts for a posthumous reward while simultaneously fearing retribution; and so we submit to the divine will only out of a wholly negative combination of fear and desire for profit. By contrast, Sergius does not regard God’s justice as being somehow opposed to love. Rather, God’s justice consists in his presenting to humanity two alternative afterlife destinations, these being decided on the basis of a person’s voluntarily chosen way of life. Sergius sees the essence of a true Orthodox life as consisting in a love which moves beyond the boundaries of self, and denies self for the sake of a greater good. Of course, this presupposes the free following of Jesus Christ out of a desire for eternal life in Him – which should not be regarded as a “reward,” but as an inner experience of the Kingdom in all its reality. In this way we are purified from the pollution of sin and granted knowledge of and communion with God as we rise to eternal life. In other words, the work of Christ consists in how through grace he has liberated us from our slavery to sin to follow his practical example of repudiating those desires which turn us from God and deprive us of communion with him. The image of God is recreated in us through faith and the sacraments, by means of which we strive to achieve the likeness of God. Meanwhile, being deprived of the bliss of communication with God and excluded from the divine life is punishment enough for the sinner. Another adherent of this moral theory of redemption was Mikhail Tareev, a teacher of moral theology in Moscow Theological Academy. The theory forms the foundation of Tareev’s kenotic theology, as outlined in The Disparagement of Our God, Jesus the Christ (1901), and The Foundations of Christianity (1908–1916). However, this moral theory was not acknowledged by all theologians, and was strongly criticized by a number of representatives of the academic tradition. In his course on dogmatics and in Talks on the Suffering of our God, Jesus the Christ, Archbishop Philaret Gumilyovsky criticized the Socinians7 and other representatives of liberal theology, and underscored the expiatory meaning of Christ’s death on the cross as the moment of satisfaction, for otherwise the eternal and inviolable order of divine righteousness would be destroyed. More detailed criticism of the moral theory of redemption, and a corresponding revival of the legal theory, can be found in Silvestr’s course on dogmatics; in E. P. Akvilonov’s book, On the Saviour and Salvation (1899); and in the works of N. P. Malinovsky, including his 1906 treatise, On the Saviour-God: A Dogmatic Essay. These critics are particularly anxious to understand justice as a real and distinguishable divine attribute, one which is not subsumed by the attribute of love but is conjoined to it. They are further concerned to stress the distinct reality

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

231

of sin, which cannot be overcome simply by learning the truth or by Christ’s example of a perfect life. Therefore there must be an objective restoration of the communion between God and humanity, which was destroyed by sin. This restoration is impossible without the death of Christ, which once and for all satisfied the divine justice, reconciling God and humanity and transfiguring our moral state. In other words, here too the dual objective and subjective aspects of atonement are drawn out, just as in the works of Svetlov. In an attempt to answer these criticisms, Victor Ivanovich Nesmelov (1863– 1937), a teacher at Kazan Theological Academy, advanced an alternative moral account of expiation, though worked out somewhat in parallel with the ideas of Sergius. To start off, he recategorized dogmatics under anthropology as opposed to patristic scholarship. His point was that references to Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition were ineffective, as they necessarily presupposed a prior belief in the truth of Christianity, whereas in his opinion “the only way to arrive at universal agreement is through a scientific account of the problem of humanity.” In his two-volume treatise, The Science of Man (1899–1906), Nesmelov tackles St. Theophan’s now-traditional conception of the Fall, arguing that the Fall was in fact nothing more than a mistake of Adam’s which he made while still in an “infantile” spiritual state, in which condition a person was absolutely bound to offend God and so lose his or her moral freedom. Because humanity fell, so all creation has lost its rational purpose. Nevertheless, humanity did not change in its essential nature, but only as the elements of that nature are correlated. Clearly, we humans have lost neither mind nor rationality nor free will; but, rather, a fateful contradiction between body and spirit has appeared, which puts us in an abnormal relationship with God and the world. On this basis, Nesmelov suggests that the “legal” understanding of salvation supposes merely the forgiveness of sin, whereas if salvation is truly to be achieved, then the complete elimination of sin is required. Unlike other adherents of the moral theory of expiation, Nesmelov places a special emphasis on the death of Christ as an act of divine self-sacrifice. While he does not see this as a payment for human sins, he does regard it objectively as the only way in which the sins of the world might be purified. In other words, while the cross does not actually save a sinner from death, it does give the sinner a real chance to achieve salvation. This is because the death of Christ is the means by which the sinner is returned to the moment of Adam’s creation, equally capable now of both good and evil. In the light of the incarnation, everyone is called to salvation and every person is “necessarily a member of the eternal Body of Christ.” This becomes the basis for Nesmelov’s argument for universal salvation. Nesmelov’s moral theory of expiation lies at the beginning of the Russian existentialist movement, and so became a considerable influence on Nikolai A. Berdyaev and the ideas of the so-called New Religious Mind school. Thus, right at the beginning of the twentieth century, the dispute over expiation theory does not quieten down, but on the contrary, positions become more radical. Criticisms of the moral theory of redemption gain ground through the works of E. A. Budrin,

232

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

D. Dobrosmyslov, P. Levitov, M. Vishnetsky, and V. Betkovsky; while adherents of the moral theory include the priest N. V. Petrov, P. P. Ponomaryov, Archpriest A. Tuberovsky, Archimandrite Ilarion, and Metropolitan Anthony. Through these figures, the dispute over expiation went beyond the limits of nineteenth-century Russia and was continued through the theology of the Russian emigration. The moral theory of redemption, together with its accompanying “secular” variation on the theme of religious community, was sharply criticized by the ascetic monastic tradition. Yet more criticism was directed at Leo Tolstoy, who was seen as moving beyond the scope of Christianity altogether, in that he denied the incarnation and regarded Christ as a mere moral example, thus nullifying the need for any theory of expiation at all. In particular, one Father John Kronshtadsky (1829–1908, canonized 1988) objected most strenuously to the activity and writings of Tolstoy. In his book, My Life in Christ, Kronshtadsky explores the topic of the passions as the source of sin, and regards the essence of the Christian life as an unending struggle against them with the help of the grace of God. While Kronshtadsky holds to the legal concept of expiation, he concentrates on arguing that the purification, sanctification, strengthening, and renewal of an individual simply are not possible in terms of the realization of an ideal, but are made possible only through the sacraments of the church. In his opinion, church liturgy was a sign of the immeasurable love of God for the whole of humanity, and a sign too of our miraculous exaltation to Godlike status through the incarnation of the Son. Such an accent on the church and the sacramentality of the liturgical life is the antithesis of nineteenth-century “secular” theology’s approach. However, the ever-strengthening conjunction of existentialism and “scientific” anthropology in the religious thought of Dostoevsky, Solovyov, and other representatives of Russia’s “religious renaissance” meant that traditional theology and ecclesiology simply had to be reconsidered. Some of the most radical representatives of this “religious renaissance,” such as Berdyaev, rejected the dogmatic “immobility of the Church,” considering this to be symptomatic of spiritual death; they rejected also the narrowness of historical Christianity as a religion whose only real concern was the afterlife approached through an ascetic ideal. Others such as Bulgakov and P. A. Florensky were not quite so radical, but spoke nevertheless of the necessity of historical progress and spiritual creativity in the church. The church’s mission, they argued, was to embrace the whole sphere of culture, and not to confine itself merely to eucharistic or soteriological concerns.

Conclusion Regardless of the similarity of topics and the elements of mutual influence, the style and methodology of both theology in the academy and the much more ecclesiastically oriented monastic ascetic theology differ considerably from the third strand of so-called “secular” theology. The depth of the divide

RUSSIAN THEOLOGY

233

between this “secular” religious community and the church hierarchy became very clear in the unsuccessful attempts at religious and philosophical dialogue in 1900–1903, and is further illustrated by the strained relations between Russian intellectuals and the elders of Optina desert.8 Nevertheless, the heterogeneity and diversity of Russian theology in the nineteenth century make for an interesting reflection of the spiritual life of the period. Acknowledgments

Translated from the Russian by Diana Tsaghikyan and edited by Frances Henderson. Notes 1 This thesis did not meet with universal agreement. It was strongly criticized by Stephan Yavorsky in The Stone of Belief (1728), and even more so by Theophilact Lopatinsky in his unpublished retort to Prokopovich’s book, On God’s Unbearable Yoke. These two critics argued that while both salvation and justification are possible without works, sins are not simply non-imputed but are actually taken away by justification. 2 See Platon, Metropolitan of Moscow, The Orthodox Doctrine of the Apostolic Eastern Church; or, a Compendium of Christian Theology (in Greek, 1785; trans., New York: AMS Press, 1969). 3 Vassiliy Mikhailovich Drozdov, canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1994. 4 Archimandrite Philaret’s first writings included Differences between the Eastern and Western Churches in the Teaching of Doctrine, composed for the Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna (1811); and also a review of theological disciplines (1814). 5 See Genesis 1:26. 6 Glukharyov: this is a different Archimandrite Makarius than the more influential Bulgakov referenced below. (Ed.) 7 Socinianism is an early, sixteenth-century form of rationalistic theology named after its founders, Laelius and Faustus Socinus. Its adherents believed that death should be seen as something natural and not as a punishment for sin, with the implication that sin was not so serious after all, so that Jesus’ death should not be viewed as any kind of atonement or satisfaction. They believed also that Christ was not the pre-existent Son of God, and that he had not existed before his earthly birth; nevertheless, he should be adored because of his adoption and exaltation by God, and imitated by those who wished to live a simple, disciplined, and loving life. Finally, the Socinians regarded the sacraments as “signs and not seals,” and considered that the church was present wherever people lived in loving fellowship. The Socinian movement became particularly well established in Poland until its banishment in 1658. (Ed.) 8 The famous monastery of Optina Pustyn is situated in Kaluga Oblast, a region in central Russia, and dates back to the Middle Ages. It declined in the eighteenth century, but was revived by Metropolitan Platon, who encouraged the monks to share with the wider church their ascetic life and theology. The monastery pioneered a kind of spiritual mentorship scheme, where particularly holy monks – the “elders,” or

234

OLGA NESMIYANOVA

“startsi” – would disciple younger monks or laymen. In the course of the nineteenth century, the monastery received a number of pilgrims, including Ivan Kireevsky, who founded the Slavophile School, and also writers such as Leontyev, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Solovyov. (Ed.)

Bibliography Blane, Andrew (ed). Russia and Orthodoxy: Essays in Honor of Georges Florovsky: Vol. 2. The Religious World of Russian Culture. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. Clendenin, Daniel B. (ed). Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995. Moser, Charles A. (ed). The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Papmehl, K. A. Metropolitan Platon of Moscow (Petr Levshin, 1737–1812): The Enlightened Prelate, Scholar, and Educator. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1983. Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998. Reardon, Bernard. “Solovyov: Godmanhood,” in Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Illustrated Writers of the Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, 218–238. Sutton, Jonathan. The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov: Towards a Reassessment. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Theokritoff, Elizabeth, and Mary B. Cunningham. (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tsurikov, Vladimir (ed). Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, 1782–1867: Perspectives on the Man, His Works, and His Times. Jordanville, NY: Variable Press, 2003. Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001. Williams, Rowan. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. Zenkovsy, Vasily V., A History of Russian Philosophy, vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.

CHAPTER 11

Evangelicalism David W. Bebbington

Evangelical theology was the prevailing mode of Christian thinking in the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century. It was the doctrinal system professed by the Evangelical Revival that in the previous century had given birth to Methodism, transformed the Congregationalists and Baptists into eagerly expanding bodies, and begun to revitalize the Anglicans and Presbyterians. The revival was a pan-Protestant phenomenon and its adherents tended to sit loose to the detail of creeds inherited from the period of the Reformation. Evangelicalism was, as a disparaging Unitarian put it in 1847, “the popular Theology.”1 It was the burden of countless pulpits every Sunday in Britain, the United States, the British settler colonies, and the territories throughout the world where Anglo-Saxon missionaries had carried the Gospel. Its centrality to the church life of these lands during the nineteenth century has nevertheless been obscured in much of the secondary literature. The master narrative of the history of theology in the United States, inaugurated by Frank H. Foster in 1907, sees the central theme as the decline of Calvinism.2 The convictions brought over the Atlantic by the early settlers of New England, according to this account, gradually fell into decay over the centuries. This depiction, while far from entirely false, neglects the transformation of Calvinist thought under the impact of the Great Awakenings that constituted the American revival and ignores the rise of a parallel doctrinal tradition created by Methodism. The modified version of Calvinism together with the Arminian system of the Methodists steadily approximated to each other as the nineteenth century proceeded, forming the backbone of Evangelical theology. Likewise, the accustomed view of British religious thought in that century, as already outlined by Otto Pfleiderer in 1890 and expounded more recently by Sir Owen Chadwick and Bernard Reardon, treats its development as the rise first of the Oxford Movement and, second, of liberalism.3 Evangelical theology is pushed to the margins of the story or even beyond. For neither country, therefore, is the

236

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

vigor of the tradition of thought deriving from the revival normally given its due. What is attempted here is a sketch of some of the main features of the body of theology that molded the civilization of the English-speaking world in the Victorian era. The characteristics of Evangelical theology that had arisen in the revival period were sustained into the nineteenth century. One of them was an attachment to the Bible. The traditional biblicism of Protestants was if anything taken to a fresh pitch. Evangelicals believed in searching the Scriptures for doctrine, for guidance, and for spiritual nurture. Works of theology rarely strayed far from the biblical text, which was frequently quoted to give authority to any strand of teaching. There were guides to Bible reading such as the widely used A Scripture Help (1816) by Edward Bickersteth, one of the leading Evangelical Anglicans of his generation. The circulation of the Bible, as was undertaken by the British and Foreign Bible Society (1807), the American Bible Society (1816), and their many imitators, was conceived as a mode of propagating the Gospel in its own right. The Bible was the vehicle of revelation. “There is but one final standard of Christian living, or Christian doctrine,” wrote an American Free Methodist in 1884. “That standard is the word of God, revealed to man in the Holy Scriptures.”4 This comment was not designed to drive a wedge between the word of God and the text of the Bible, for Evangelicals would equally happily equate the Scriptures with God’s word. Yet their attitude to the Bible cannot justly be identified, as it often has been, with Fundamentalism. There was normally no dogmatic insistence that the text of the Bible must necessarily be factually accurate on all topics. The work of scholarship that remained standard among Evangelicals for forty years, Thomas Hartwell Horne’s Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures (1818), recognized that there are discrepancies in the biblical text. Similarly Charles Simeon, the mentor of generations of Evangelical Anglicans, held that it contains “inexactnesses in reference to philosophical and scientific matters.”5 Inspiration was originally defined, following Philip Doddridge from the eighteenth century, in a way that allowed for different levels of inspiration in various parts of the Bible, though with the publication of Theopneustia (1841) by Louis Gaussen, a Genevan professor of theology, a higher estimate of the matter came into vogue. Gaussen held that the very words had been breathed out by God and so that all the Scriptures were equally inspired, but even he did not accept the idea that the text was dictated to the authors of the biblical books. The Bible was loved and reverenced, but it was not treated uncritically. The theological system extracted from the Bible, second, focused on the doctrine of the cross. Although Evangelicals shared the substance of Christian orthodoxy with High Churchmen and others, they placed particular emphasis on the place of the atonement in the overall pattern of theology. Theirs was a soteriological scheme, for, as they sometimes remarked, their starting point was ruin, the first of the doctrinal “three r’s.” Their conviction was that humanity was fallen, and so universally infected by the disease of sin that alienated it from the Almighty. There was therefore a need for redemption, the second of the r’s, which had been

EVANGELICALISM

237

achieved by Jesus on the cross. An editorial in the main American Methodist periodical, The Christian Advocate and Journal, for 1872 had as its title “The Cleansing Blood.” “As the sacrifice of Christ lies at the foundation of all Christian doctrine,” it contended, “so is its application essential to all Christian purity and life.”6 The received view was that the death of Jesus was both substitutionary and penal. Jesus, that is to say, took the place of human beings in order to receive the punishment for the sin that ruled their lives. Because he had suffered in their stead, they could be forgiven. The work of Christ was in some sense exemplary, since the submissive humility of the Son of God formed a model for Christian behavior, but it was the power of the cross to turn aside the wrath of God that was dwelt upon. The Evangelical stress on the atonement contrasted with alternative interpretations of Christian theology that saw the incarnation as its kernel. Both AngloCatholics and Broad Churchmen in the Anglican communion, together with the many who were influenced by them in other denominations, normally treated the taking of flesh by the Son of God as the greatest doctrine of the faith. But Evangelicals remained convinced that Christmas was important primarily as a prelude to Good Friday. Every minister, according to the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1837, should “keep the cross of Christ ever in view.”7 The atonement was the fulcrum of the Evangelical theological scheme. The work of Christ was nevertheless ineffectual unless it was applied to the soul of the individual. The third “r,” following ruin and redemption, was regeneration. All human beings, it was believed, had to be born again if they were to have the prospect of going to heaven. There was no ultimate advantage in giving time, wealth, or influence for the cause of Christ, declared the British Wesleyan Methodist Magazine for 1860, if there had been no personal submission to the Savior. “Christ has to do with you, to break your heart, to melt your soul, to bring you a happy captive to Himself.”8 The process was one of conversion, which was seen as the human side of regeneration. Whereas regeneration, according to the “Theological Dictionary” issued by the English Baptist minister John Rippon in 1801, was “the MOTION OF GOD in the heart of a sinner,” conversion was “the MOTION OF THE HEART of a sinner towards God.”9 The two were intimately related, and both, most Evangelicals believed, were in the last resort the effect of the Holy Spirit, whose work it was to bring people to Christ. Only those who had been converted were true Christians, for the experience was the essential gateway – the wicket gate of Pilgrim’s Progress – to the life of discipleship. It was of no value to have been baptized as an infant if conversion did not follow in due course. Here Evangelicals differed from High Churchmen who maintained that the sacramental power of baptism was what turned people into Christians, and many of the fiercest English controversies of the early nineteenth century, culminating in the Gorham Judgement of the Privy Council in 1850, revolved around this contrast of opinion. Evangelicals nevertheless differed between themselves over the nature of conversion. Methodists, especially in the earlier nineteenth century, expected it to be instantaneous and conscious, whereas others were far more prepared to see it as a gradual and perhaps imperceptible development. The crucial point was

238

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

to be aware of having passed from darkness to light. Reform, self-improvement, or good resolutions were not enough. Conversion was conceived to be essential as the entry on the Christian life. Beyond conversion lay a life of diligent service for Christ. The activism that was a hallmark of Evangelicalism was the logical outcome of the experience of conversion. “It is the duty of every one who knows the good news of salvation through Christ,” announced The Examiner and Chronicle, the New York Baptist newspaper, in 1868, “to tell the good news, as he has opportunity and ability, to his companion who does not know it, that he too may be saved.”10 Vigorous evangelistic activity was a central characteristic of the Evangelical movement. It drove adherents of the movement to launch missions to the non-Christians in far-flung parts of the globe as well as to the nominal Christians at home. The impulse to be up and doing, furthermore, meant hostility to the power from which conversion had rescued the soul. No one can doubt, wrote a contributor to The Rocky Mountain Presbyterian in 1872, “that a profession of Christianity means war against sin wherever it is found and war to the death.”11 Hence Evangelicalism was the seedbed for many a movement of reform during the nineteenth century – against slavery (despite its staunch Evangelical champions in the American South), against drunkenness (generating the enormously influential temperance movement), and against inhumane conditions in cities and factories (supremely in the work of Lord Shaftesbury). Philanthropic effort was as regular an outcome of Evangelical belief as evangelistic endeavor, for each was rooted in the teaching of the Bible. Care for the needy, so striking a feature of the multitude of voluntary societies generated by nineteenth-century Evangelicals, was an expression of their desire to obey the commands found in Scripture. Through good works believers bore witness to the reality of grace in their lives and made advances on the pathway of sanctification. Evangelicalism, though producing saints and scholars, put far less of a premium on meditation or learning than many other Christian traditions. Its grand imperative was ever to be active in fulfilling the obligations laid on the converted soul. The theology of popular Evangelicalism in the earlier nineteenth century, though inheriting the main outlines of the Puritan dogmatic scheme, differed from its earlier equivalent because it had also been shaped by the Enlightenment. If the emphases on Bible, cross, and conversion echoed the earlier Protestant tradition, then the activism constituted a novel feature of the Evangelical mindset. Missions to the heathen, for instance, were far more a feature of Catholic lands than of Protestant countries before the emergence of Evangelical zeal. The change was related to a significant shift in the doctrine of assurance that reflected Enlightenment priorities. Puritans had wrestled with doubt, regarding assurance of salvation as an ideal to be sought after rather than the normal possession of the Christian. Conscientious believers had been expected to engage in protracted self-examination to establish whether or not they were in the faith, an introspective preoccupation that inhibited bold evangelistic ventures. Although this style of spirituality survived into the nineteenth century among

EVANGELICALISM

239

conservative Presbyterians, especially in the Highlands of Scotland, and among traditional Baptists, especially in rural England and the American South, it was not to be found among mainstream Evangelicals. Following Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, they standardly believed that it was possible to be sure of one’s personal salvation. Evangelicals shared the Enlightenment’s conviction in the power of reason, and extended its range to the spiritual realm. Knowledge of God could be as certain as the fruits of any other empirical investigation. With that confidence, they were eager to spread the truths they had attained. Their mission, furthermore, was undergirded by the typical high expectations of the future generated during the later eighteenth century. Evangelicals commonly held their own version of the idea of progress, the post-millennial belief that the Gospel would spread throughout the whole globe before the return of Christ to the earth. They looked for what they called “the latter-day glory of the church.” They did not have to wait for the Almighty to bring about the conversion of the world because they were authorized, they believed, to employ “means,” that is, techniques offered by the modern world such as sailing ships and printing presses to disseminate the Gospel. Missionary societies were modeled on joint stock companies. Here was a Christian pragmatism that saw the world as waiting to be conquered for Christ by the most efficient methods available. The Evangelical movement was bound up with the enterprise of modernity. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the integration of Evangelical thought with the legacy of the Enlightenment was the bond between theology and science. “Nature and Revelation,” wrote the English Congregational theologian John Pye Smith in 1839, “are both beams of light from the same Sun of eternal truth; and there cannot be discordance between them.”12 The unveiling of the natural world, it had been settled, could only prove effective through empirical investigation; and Evangelicals gladly avowed their adherence to the methods of the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon. They adopted and developed the natural theology that had been popularized by William Paley to show the way in which the created order vindicated belief in a Creator. Seeing evidences of design in the universe, they argued that the implication was that there must have been a Designer. An able Indian boy in a Wesleyan school in India put the essence of the case clearly when he was examined orally by a visiting examiner in 1850: “When we behold a house, we conclude that there must have been a builder: so, when we examine the works of creation, we are convinced that they have proceeded from some cause.”13 The argument from design seemed irrefutable so long as there appeared to be incontrovertible indications of purpose in the universe – with plants so formed as to be nourished by moisture, for example, and animals so constituted as to feed on plants. David Hume had challenged this line of argument by questioning the notion of causation, but Evangelicals had generally espoused the rebuttal of Humean skepticism in the commonsense school of Scottish philosophy. The notion of cause, they held, was a given of human experience, and so there had to be a connection between design and Designer. The resulting case for theism was articulated in its most persuasive form in the

240

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

writings of the Scottish Presbyterian Thomas Chalmers. For more than half of the nineteenth century, science seemed to have been successfully turned into the handmaid of theology. Among Calvinists such as Chalmers in the earlier part of the century, the dominant paradigm of theology was derived from Jonathan Edwards. Although the New England Congregational divine had died in 1758, his pattern of thinking was sustained by his disciples in America, and in particular by Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, the leading advocates of the “New Divinity.” The Edwardsean system bore the marks of accommodation to the rising temper of the Enlightenment both in its careful reasoning and in its insistence that the ways of God were consistent with public justice. Its central teaching, taken from Edwards’s Freedom of the Will (1754), distinguished natural from moral ability. Human beings, the New Divinity men argued, possessed a natural ability to believe the Gospel, even though their actions were part of a chain of causation. Their failure to respond to the Gospel was an expression of moral inability, a willful refusal that rendered them guilty of disobeying the commands of the Almighty. This analysis was an ingenious way of reconciling the principles of Calvinism with the demands of evangelism. On the one hand, its advocates could still legitimately (at least in their own estimation) claim to be loyal to the Reformed tradition in upholding predestination. God, they asserted, was the source of the causes that led to the acceptance or rejection of the Gospel. They were soft philosophical determinists, believing that, although the actions of human beings were caused, their choices were nevertheless free. On the other hand, they were keen champions of spreading the Gospel. Ministers who had pondered the implications of Calvinist belief had sometimes reached the conclusion that since God had preordained the elect for salvation, he would infallibly achieve that goal without human intervention. There was, therefore, no need to challenge sinners to repent and believe; indeed, to do so was an impious trespassing on the prerogatives of the Almighty. The Edwardseans, however, contended that because all had a duty to embrace the offer of salvation, ministers had a responsibility to exhort their hearers to accept the Gospel. The implication was that efforts to spread the Gospel should be maximized. This was the theology that, with minor variations, was expounded in America by the Congregationalists Nathaniel Emmons and Edwards A. Park, in England by the Congregationalist Edward Williams and the Baptist Andrew Fuller, and in Scotland by the Presbyterians who followed Thomas Chalmers. It was the epitome of orthodoxy among most Evangelicals who stood in the Reformed tradition. The more conservative Calvinist thinkers looked on these developments with suspicion. The new ways of setting out the way of salvation seemed to make too many concessions to the intellectual spirit of the age. Andrew Fuller, in particular, was attacked for teaching “duty faith,” the responsibility of sinners to believe the Gospel. But how, asked the traditionalists, could the non-elect be supposed to have an obligation to believe what they could not believe? The revisionists must be abandoning the limitation of salvation to the elect and with it the idea of particular redemption that was at the heart of Reformed belief. The charge had a

EVANGELICALISM

241

measure of validity: moderate Calvinists commonly did hold that the scope of the atonement was in some sense universal even though it was effectual only for those who accepted the Gospel. The “Old Calvinists” would have no truck with such a formula, implying, as it seemed to do, that the redemptive purpose of the Almighty could be frustrated. The underlying issue was that, whereas the Edwardseans were determinists, the traditionalists were fatalists. They believed in irresistible grace, a divine power that extinguished any possibility of human freedom. These views were upheld by the strict Baptists on both sides of the Atlantic who sustained an older piety. In America, they were often called “Anti-Mission Baptists” because, with unassailable logic, they contended that missions were an unwarrantable attempt to supersede predestination. Those whom God had chosen he would call in his own way, not by human means. The traditional Calvinism was upheld with greater theological acuteness by a number of Presbyterian divines, chiefly in the United States, and especially at Princeton Seminary. There Charles Hodge argued manfully for a confessional Calvinism that, he contended, Edwards himself would have endorsed even if his nineteenth-century successors did not. But Hodge, unlike Edwards, adopted the commonsense philosophy and so, in a sense, made his peace with part of the legacy of the Enlightenment. Only those who, like the Primitive Baptists of the American South, put themselves outside the cultural mainstream could avoid its pervasive influence. The Evangelicals in the Church of England normally, though not exclusively, took the Calvinist side in the controversies against the Arminianism of John Wesley during the eighteenth century. In the following century its ministry contained a number of stalwart Calvinists such as D. A. Doudney, the editor of The Gospel Magazine from 1840 to 1893. Most Anglican Evangelicals, however, were less committed to the Reformed heritage than their Dissenting counterparts in England. The man who shaped the thinking of Evangelical Anglicans for much of the century was Charles Simeon, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, from 1783 to 1836. Simeon, who was essentially a preacher, believed in extracting his theology inductively from the Bible. He rejected, in a fashion typical of the Enlightenment, the whole enterprise of metaphysics. He claimed to be “no friend to systematizers in Theology.”14 Before the end of his career, he publicly repudiated Calvinism since it was associated in the public mind with the Puritans and revolution. His disciples, who included Bishops Charles McIlvaine in the United States and Charles Perry in Australia, carried his style of pragmatic, evangelistic theology throughout the worldwide Anglican communion. The alternative to Calvinism in the Evangelical world at the opening of the nineteenth century was Arminianism. This body of thought was professed by the small bodies of General or Freewill Baptists, but it was chiefly the possession of Methodism. John Wesley, its founder, had died in 1791, but he had established the theological parameters of his movement for virtually the whole of the succeeding century. Wesley had waged ceaseless war on Calvinism, supposing that predestination undermined the responsibility to observe the moral law. His teaching followed that of the early seventeenth-century Dutch theologian Jacobus

242

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

Arminius in holding that Christ died not for a limited number of the elect but for all. John’s brother Charles insisted in his hymnody, “For all, for all, my Saviour died.” There was therefore no doubt that the Gospel must be preached to any who would hear. But since Wesley rejected the Calvinist doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, he maintained that true converts could subsequently fall from grace. A person lapsing into a course of sin had ceased to be a Christian and was in need of a fresh conversion. The grand aim of the Christian life, however, was holiness. Wesley believed that it was possible to reach a state of entire sanctification, what he called “perfect love,” before the grave. All known sin was removed from the soul and the believer enjoyed uninterrupted communion with God. Again, this state could be lost and won repeatedly. Wesley reached these conclusions partly by reading the Bible, but partly by observation of his followers. The experience of Methodists was formative of theology because he held that the discipline is as experimental as natural science, in which he took a deep interest. He was an empiricist in the manner of the Enlightenment. “It is a fundamental principle with us,” he wrote, “that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion.”15 There could hardly be a more explicit declaration of alignment with the age of reason. The immense success of Methodism led to the growth of revivalism in theory as well as in practice. There was a long-standing tradition of revivals in the Presbyterian tradition. At the protracted communion seasons of Scotland and America, anxiety for salvation could sweep over whole communities and last for several weeks. But with the advent of Methodism, intense revivals, often more noisy and emotional in manner, became regular features of the Evangelical scene. Evangelists of the other denominations started aiming to stir up revivals. Charles Finney, an American who worked with Presbyterians and Congregationalists, turned the technique into something like a science in his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835). He advocated “new measures” to facilitate conversions. Sinners troubled about the fate of their souls, for example, would be placed on an anxious seat at the front of a meeting in order to be objects of prayer for the whole congregation. Finney urged that, instead of taking time to work through their concerns regarding their soul, those seeking salvation should immediately surrender to Christ. The theologian who most clearly provided a rationale for Finney’s procedures was Nathaniel W. Taylor of New Haven, Connecticut. Starting with the principle of duty faith that a person has an obligation to believe the Gospel, Taylor argued that there can be no “ought” without “can”. He inferred that all human beings must have a free capacity to believe. Conversion, as he put it, was “within the sinner’s will.” Finney echoed this view. “Neither God,” he wrote, “nor any other being, can regenerate him, if he will not turn.”16 Swept along by currents of thought drawn from the Enlightenment, Finney adopted a high view of human ability. He subsequently went on to embrace a view of human perfectibility similar to that of Wesley. Under the influence of a desire to maximize conversions, the structure of traditional theology was being eroded.

EVANGELICALISM

243

The impulse to spread the Gospel led to the creation of overseas missions, beginning in England with the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS, founded in 1792) and in the United States with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM, founded in 1810). The driving theology was outlined in the book An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792) by William Carey, the first person sent out to India by the BMS. It was the doctrinal system of Carey’s friend Andrew Fuller, the New Divinity deriving from Jonathan Edwards. The great example, cited in Carey’s conclusion, was David Brainerd, Edwards’s friend, who had gone as a missionary to the Native Americans. The notions of duty, benevolence, and postmillennial Gospel triumph were to the fore. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was even more prominent in the version of missionary undertaking launched by Alexander Duff from Presbyterian Scotland in India (1830). Drawing on the thought of Chalmers, he devised a strategy in which education, the panacea of enlightened thinkers, should take priority over preaching. High-caste Hindus were trained in Western philosophy through the medium of English in the belief that they would be convinced by Christian apologetics and that their example would lead to the conversion of the lower castes. The most eloquent challenge to this approach came from Rufus Anderson, foreign secretary of the ABCFM from 1826 to 1866, who argued that to use English in education would alienate indigenous peoples from their own culture and so not reap a large harvest. Instead he advocated the training of indigenous ministry and the encouragement of local responsibility for church life. His views were substantially shared by Henry Venn, honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 to 1872. The other major figure influencing missions was the legendary Scot, David Livingstone, an agent of the London Missionary Society before resigning to become the most celebrated African explorer of the century. His Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) contended that a combination of Christianity and commerce would transform the continent. The assumption of them all was that civilization went hand in hand with the faith. The synthesis of Gospel and culture available for export, it must be concluded, had been profoundly affected by influences stemming from the Enlightenment. The central theme in the history of Evangelical theology from the 1820s onward, however, is its attempts to come to terms with the impact of Romanticism, the cultural movement that steadily supplanted the Enlightenment. Perhaps the fresh style of thinking is best known in the English-speaking world through the Lake poets, especially William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The new mood, however, was not confined to that generation of literary figures but steadily spread through the various departments of intellectual life as the century advanced. Romanticism in this broad sense replaced the Enlightenment’s stress on reason with an emphasis on will and emotion. Awe, mystery, and the dramatic came into vogue, as in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. Metaphysics returned to fashion as the philosophical works of the German schools of Kant and Hegel were read. The historicism of Germany also found a deep echo in English-speaking

244

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

lands, where the writings of Sir Walter Scott nourished a regard for the ancient, the traditional, and the customary. The distinctive German idea that values are not absolute but relative to particular cultural settings made gradual headway. Meanwhile, the understanding of a static universe operating according to fixed laws gave way in many fields to a vision of a world of change, growth, and development. The favorite metaphors for human beings were no longer mechanistic but organic: they were seen less as cogs in a mighty wheel than as trees nurtured in their own soil. A love of nature in its untamed grandeur – an admiration for mountains, lakes, and forests – was near the heart of the new sensibility. With such a profound mental revolution in progress, theology could not remain immune. How did Evangelicals respond? In the first place, they reacted against the most striking expression of the new way of thinking in the churches, the Oxford Movement. In the Church of England, J. H. Newman, E. B. Pusey, and their associates, inspired by a Romantic sense of history, set out to recover the Catholic inheritance of the early Christian centuries, so introducing much higher doctrines of the church, the ministry, and the sacraments than had been customary. Newman’s eventual secession to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 merely confirmed what Evangelicals had already concluded: that the enterprise was a plot to repudiate Protestantism. Those swayed by the Oxford Movement who remained Anglicans began to turn to ritualism, the introduction of Catholic practices into worship in order to evoke a sense of the numinous. Evangelicals stridently denounced the new developments, but they also produced reasoned theological replies. William Goode, a London clergyman, argued in The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice (1842) for the uniqueness of Scripture, as against tradition, as a source of religious authority. The fathers of the early church, he contended, treated the Bible alone as the complete repository of truth. Likewise, E. A. Litton wrote a treatise on The Church of Christ, published in 1851, the year he was appointed vice principal of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, in order to state the ecclesiology of Evangelical Anglicans against the Puseyites. In 1871 Nathaniel Dimock, a clergyman in Kent, published a powerful book on The Doctrine of the Sacraments. On points of detail, however, Dimock shows signs of a willingness to move toward the Anglo-Catholics. He was willing by the end of the century, for instance, to accept the idea that the eucharist involves a representation (though not a re-presentation) of the death of Christ. His fellow Evangelical Anglicans increasingly adopted liturgical patterns initiated by ritualists. It is clear that they were drawn toward compromise with a tradition that was catering for the Romantic tastes of the times. The most significant early adoption of an element of Romantic thinking by Evangelicals was in the area of eschatology. The brilliant but wayward Church of Scotland minister in London in the 1820s, Edward Irving, who spent time in conversation with Coleridge, adopted a histrionic style of declamation, embraced high doctrines of the church and sacraments before the Oxford Movement, endorsed speaking in tongues within his congregation, and eventually inspired a new denomination, the Catholic Apostolic Church. But probably his greatest significance

EVANGELICALISM

245

lay in his teaching about the Second Advent. In 1827 he published a translation of a strange work by a Chilean Jesuit entitled The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, which predicted the imminent personal return of Christ, a belief then little known among Evangelicals. Abandoning the post-millennialism of his contemporaries, Irving urged that Christ himself would usher in the millennium, when he would reign on earth. This pre-millennial teaching, appealing to the new appreciation of the dramatic, gradually spread among Evangelicals of the Church of England as the century wore on. A version of it, dispensationalism, was zealously propagated by J. N. Darby, the leading personality in the early stages of the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren movement. World history, according to Darby, was divided into periods, or dispensations, in each of which the Almighty dealt in a distinct way with human beings. The church was an insertion into the divine scheme that would soon be caught up to meet its returning Lord in the air. By the end of the century, dispensationalism had become popular in America, where it was to form the ideological glue of Fundamentalism. Its origins, however, must be seen as an irruption of Romantic sensibility into the Evangelical world. Another symptom of Romantic influence is discernible in attitudes to holiness. The Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification was originally confined to Methodists, but, especially at meetings in the home of Walter and Phoebe Palmer in New York from the 1830s, began to attract attention from outsiders. From the 1860s a holiness movement developed beyond the bounds of Methodism. Phoebe Palmer taught that the experience of sanctification comes not after a long struggle, which was Wesley’s view, but immediately in response to seeking faith. This was to break with the gradualism of the Enlightenment in favor of the crisis beloved of Romantics. This view became the teaching of the Keswick Convention, which from 1875 was the fulcrum of a nondenominational holiness impulse that spread around the world. Keswick held that holiness, like salvation, comes by faith. The state was achieved, according to Evan Hopkins, the Anglican clergyman who was its chief exponent, “by a decisive act of will.”17 The resulting experience was one of peace, “the rest of faith.” Although it made relatively little headway in the United States, the Keswick view became the prevailing attitude to the spiritual life among Evangelical Anglicans. The movement nurtured a love of poetry, its leaders often expressed an admiration for Wordsworth, and its center, Keswick itself, was in the heart of the district associated with the Lake poets. “The lovely face of nature’s panorama,” an adherent wrote in 1895, “… must ever have a chastening and purifying effect.”18 The Keswick conception of holiness should be seen as another result of the fusion of Evangelical theology with Romantic feeling. A further indication of the same process is evident in the theology of mission. The initiator was again Edward Irving, who in 1824 preached a sermon before the London Missionary Society in which, with characteristic extravagance, he denounced at length the methods of his host organization. Irving argued that the structure of home committees, financial support, and business techniques should be discarded in favor of simple reliance on God. The apostles sent out as

246

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

missionaries by Jesus, he told his hearers, had to plant faith: “therefore he made his missionaries men of Faith, that they might plant Faith, and Faith alone.”19 His vision of the missionary was of an individual depending on the Almighty for his daily needs. The vision was fulfilled in a different field by George Müller, a Brethren philanthropist in Bristol, who long ran an orphanage on faith principles, making no appeals for money but waiting for the Lord’s provision. It was Müller’s account of his experiences that induced James Hudson Taylor to launch his China Inland Mission (CIM, founded in 1865). The mission pioneered the methods adopted by subsequent faith missions of having no subscribers but only prayer partners. The Romantic ethos of the CIM was evident, for example, in its magazine cover, which had elaborate floral decoration in the Pre-Raphaelite mode; its supporters had to give on divine impulse; and its exaltation of faith was clearly kin to Keswick teaching. Its replacement of prudent organizational techniques with heroic personal endeavor encapsulated the shift away from the rationality of the Enlightenment to something more in keeping with the spirit of the age. The changes effected by Romanticism that have been reviewed so far tended to draw Evangelicals into conservative theological channels. The most important developments associated with the new impulse, however, pushed them in the opposite direction, toward theological liberalism. The prime mover in America was the Congregationalist Horace Bushnell, who said that he owed more to Coleridge than to any other source except the Bible. Bushnell’s “Dissertation on Language” in his God in Christ (1849) contended that religious discourse should be understood not literally but poetically. Doctrine was therefore incapable of precise formulation. The main journal of the more traditional Methodists was to claim that his ideas were too vague and indefinite, mere “images of fog.”20 The central doctrinal shift was away from the conception of God as Governor, a view favored by the New Divinity, to the idea of him as Father. Tender feelings encouraged by the temper of the times, especially in respectable families, made it easier to think of him as a kindly parent than as a stern judge. There was consequently an alteration in the way in which the atonement was stated. It became harder to think of the Almighty willingly inflicting suffering on his own Son, and so the substitutionary understanding of the cross came under attack. Bushnell contended for a moral influence theory in his book The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866). It was hoped, furthermore, that a lenient Father would not inflict eternal punishment on his wayward children, and so the traditional doctrine of hell became less widely believed. Some turned to universalism, the expectation that all will ultimately be saved; others rested content with conditional immortality, the opinion that only believers will receive a heavenly reward while unbelievers will simply die. These slackenings of received convictions, particularly notable among the Congregationalists in Britain as well as in America, represented the arrival of milder views under Romantic influence. Attitudes to the Bible underwent a comparable modification, chiefly because of the reception of German theories based on historicist principles that once more reflected the assumptions of the Romantic era. It was growingly believed

EVANGELICALISM

247

by German scholars that the Bible must be analyzed critically so as to discern the historical evolution of its ideas. When these suppositions were first widely ventilated in the Church of England by the publication of Essays and Reviews (1860), the Evangelical world was almost solid in its horrified opposition. Advanced Broad Churchmen seemed to have gone over to the party of the scurrilous freethinkers who had been in the habit of pointing out the discrepancies in the Bible in order to discredit it. But gradually Evangelical scholars began to take up some of the suggestions of the higher critics of Germany. The greatest crisis came in the later 1870s, when William Robertson Smith, a brilliant young professor in the Free Church of Scotland, upheld the view that the text of Deuteronomy was composed after the time of Moses. After protracted discussion, his views were originally judged legitimate, though a further seemingly irresponsible article sealed his dismissal. By the end of the century, higher criticism was entrenched in most of the theological institutions of the English-speaking world. The notion that the idea of development was the key to understanding the world was growing in intellectual circles before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859), but his book gave a huge fillip to thinking in terms of growth. As the principle of the transformation of species became generally accepted, the arguments of natural theology no longer seemed tenable. If nature could adapt itself to its environment, there was no need for a Designer of the universe. Some Evangelicals were consequently troubled. The most vigorous repudiator of Darwin’s theories in the Evangelical camp in England, T. R. Birks, Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, argued not that the biologist’s theory contravened Scripture but that he was ignoring the proper methodological principles hammered out by thinkers whose debt was to the Enlightenment. Likewise, a contributor to the American Congregational Bibliotheca Sacra in 1863 condemned Darwin for abandoning inductive method and so being “notoriously imaginative as to his data, and hypothetical in his reasonings.”21 Thirty years later, however, the same journal was saying that the theory of evolution had been “of essential service to theology” by giving larger views of the government of God based on the doctrine of immanence.22 Broader evangelicals took Darwin into their systems, allowing its themes to reconstruct their theology. The Scottish Free Churchman Henry Drummond went so far as to deploy evolution as a vehicle for evangelism in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883). Growth toward maturity became a central motif of liberal Evangelical thought. The other main broadening element in Evangelical thought at the end of the century, it must be admitted, owed little to the Romantic currents of opinion of the time. The social Gospel was chiefly a response to the problems of the cities in an industrializing world. It was not solely an Evangelical movement, for some of its exponents on both sides of the Atlantic were from different ecclesiastical traditions. Nor was it intrinsically liberal in its theological affinities. The Salvation Army, for example, which remained impeccably fixed in its doctrinal anchorage, was prominent in the move toward trying to solve the difficulties of urban society. Yet among

248

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

evangelicals the social Gospel represented an addition if not an alteration to their theology. Preaching, according to Professor H. G. Mitchell of the Methodist Boston University in 1895, was only part of the mission of Jesus. “He preached when he had opportunity; but he seems to have spent more time in healing the sick and otherwise supplying the physical needs of his countrymen than he did in talking to the multitudes that thronged him.”23 Accordingly, the mission of the church needed to expand to take on board the priorities of its Master. In England John Clifford and Hugh Price Hughes, the two leading social Gospellers, similarly put fresh tasks on the ecclesiastical agenda rather than subtracting old ones from it. Very few in the Evangelical world saw the new social message as a diversion from the true Gospel until well into the twentieth century. The modifications of the Gospel based on Romantic premises, however, did create alarm. The most vigorous rebuttal of late Victorian trends came from the doughty Baptist minister in London, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. In the Down Grade controversy of 1887–1888, he publicly withdrew from the Baptist Union because he could not continue to associate with deniers of fundamental truths. Although Spurgeon was a firm Calvinist, he was not protesting against the views of John Clifford, nor against the Arminian theology that Clifford shared with other General Baptists. Rather he was criticizing those who, swayed by contemporary intellectual currents, were “giving up the atoning sacrifice, denying the inspiration of Holy Scripture, and casting slurs upon justification by faith.”24 He was voicing anxieties that were to surface in more widespread and more sustained forms after the First World War and were then to polarize Evangelicalism in America into Modernist and Fundamentalist factions. The liberal tendencies of the later nineteenth century pointed clearly to the one, just as Spurgeon’s concerns anticipated the other. At the end of the Victorian era, however, the polarization had not yet come to fruition. The American evangelist Dwight L. Moody, though himself adopting the pre-millennial teaching that was to be the rallying call of the Fundamentalists, nevertheless could use broader men such as Henry Drummond on his platform. Similarly the catechism of the Evangelical Free Churches, issued in London in 1899, still represented the common beliefs of all its constituent denominations, Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, and Presbyterian. Evangelical Anglicans could have used it without demur. It spoke of God as Father, and yet adhered to a fairly traditional understanding of the atonement as propitiating the divine holiness. Liberal and conservative strands had not yet been sundered. The common Evangelical faith remained the popular theology of the English-speaking world.

Notes 1 William Gaskell, Some Evil Tendencies of the Popular Theology: A Sermon (Wakefield, 1847), 3. 2 Frank H. Foster, A Genetic History of the New England Theology (Chicago, 1907).

EVANGELICALISM

249

3 Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant and Its Progress in Great Britain since 1825 (London, 1890); Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London, 1966–1970); and B. M. G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: A Survey from Coleridge to Gore (London, 1980). 4 Free Methodist, January 9, 1884, 1. 5 A. W. Brown, Recollections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev. Charles Simeon (London, 1863), 100. 6 Christian Advocate and Journal (New York), October 3, 1872, 316. 7 Account of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Session of the Baptist Union (London, 1837), 30. 8 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, February 1860, 118. 9 John Rippon, The Baptist Annual Register for 1801 and 1802 (London, n.d.), 664. 10 Examiner and Chronicle, January 2, 1868. 11 Rocky Mountain Presbyterian, October 1872. 12 John Pye Smith, On the Relation between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science (London, 1839), 168. 13 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, September 1850, 996. 14 Charles Simeon, Horae Homileticae, 21 vols. (London, 1832–1833), 1, xxii. 15 John Wesley to Dr. Thomas Rutherforth, March 28, 1768, in The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A. M., 8 vols., ed. John Telford (London, 1931), 5, 364. 16 Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Systematic Theology, ed. George Radford (London, 1851), 413. 17 E. H. Hopkins, The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life (London, 1884), 15. 18 Christian, July 25, 1895, 14. 19 Edward Irving, For Missionaries after the Apostolical School: A Series of Orations (London, 1825), 28. 20 Christian Advocate, August 1, 1872, 244. 21 Bibliotheca Sacra, April 1863, 264 (J. M. Manning). 22 Ibid., July 1893, 413–414 (F. H. Foster). 23 Methodist Review, March 1895, 269. 24 Sword and the Trowel, April 1887, 195.

Bibliography Primary Primary sources are too numerous to be listed here, but a few of the main texts are mentioned in the body of this chapter.

Secondary Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: 1989. Conforti, J. A. Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement. Grand Rapids, MI: 1981. Dale, R. W. The Old Evangelicalism and the New. London: 1889. Dieter, M. E. The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century. Metuchen, NJ: 1980.

250

DAVID W. BEBBINGTON

Foster, F. H. A Genetic History of the New England Theology. Chicago: 1907. Glover, W. B. Evangelical Nonconformists and the Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century. London: 1954. Guelzo, A. C. Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate. Middletown, CT: 1989. Jones, R. Tudur. Congregationalism in England, 1662–1962. London: 1962. Kuklick, Bruce. Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey. New Haven, CT: 1985. Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture, 1870–1925. New York: 1980. Noll, Mark A. (ed.). The Princeton Theology, 1812–1921. Grand Rapids, MI: 1983. Reardon, B. M. G. Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: A Survey from Coleridge to Gore. London: 1980. Strawson, William. “Methodist Theology, 1850–1950.” In A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, 4 vols., ed. Rupert Davies et al. (London, 1965–1988), 3, 182–231.

CHAPTER 12

Kenotic Christology David R. Law

In Philippians 2:5–8, Paul urges his readers to emulate “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself (heauton ekeno¯sen), taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6–7). On the basis of the use of the term ekeno¯sen in this text, “kenosis” has come to be used as a technical term to explain how divine and human natures can coexist in the one, united person of Christ. Although the term is derived from Philippians 2:7, “kenosis” denotes an issue intrinsic to the entire New Testament. On the one hand, the New Testament affirms Christ’s divine status. Christ is the preexistent divine Logos who is one with the Father (John 1:1–18), and is the image of the invisible God and the agent of creation (Colossians 1:15). On the other hand, the New Testament affirms the reality of Christ’s humanity. He weeps, is tired, and suffers anguish, pain, Godforsakenness, and death. How to reconcile Scripture’s dual witness to Christ’s divinity and humanity was a subject of dispute in the early church and led in 451 to the Chalcedonian Definition or “two-natures” doctrine that Christ is truly God and truly a human being, and that divinity and humanity are united in the one, unified person of Christ without confusion, change, division, or separation. This classical Christology, however, left certain questions unanswered. Above all, it left unclear how the divine and human natures can exist in a single person without the integrity of either nature being compromised. According to the classical understanding of divinity, God is eternal, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Human beings, however, are temporal and finite, and their powers and knowledge are limited. How, then, can Christ live a genuinely human life if he possesses divine attributes that appear fundamentally to contradict what it means to be a human being? The problem, then, is how can the affirmation that Christ is truly divine be reconciled with the claim that he is simultaneously truly human?

252

DAVID R. LAW

This question had always been an issue in Christian theology, but it became acute in nineteenth-century Germany as the result of the new intellectual developments that had been taking place since the Enlightenment. The rise of the historical criticism of the Bible brought with it an increasing consciousness of how Jesus was a man of his times and influenced by his Jewish environment. There thus arose a stronger awareness of the humanity of Jesus, which sharpened the problem of how the human being Jesus of Nazareth could at the same time be said to be divine. The rise of psychology with its notions of personality and consciousness further sharpened the problem of the relation between divine and human natures by raising the question of Jesus’ self-consciousness and the relation of his human consciousness to his divine consciousness. David Strauss’s (1808–1874) controversial The Life of Jesus (1835–1836) as well as his Glaubenslehre (1840–1841) contributed to pushing the question of Christology to the forefront of theological debate.1 Much research into the historical Jesus was motivated by the dogmatic aim of affirming the historical truth of the Gospel portrayal of Jesus and opposing Strauss’s docetic dissolution of Jesus into a philosophical idea. These were aims shared by many of the kenotic theologians, who were concerned to find ways of reconciling the Christ of dogmatic Christology with the Gospel account of the historical Jesus. These theologians sought to construct Christologies in which Christ appeared not merely as a general philosophical principle, but also as a genuinely historical human being. The notion of development also played a role in creating the conditions in which kenotic Christology would flourish. Idealist philosophy, which conceived of world history as a process of development in which the divine spirit unfolded itself in ever richer forms, helped to make the notion of development an important factor in philosophical and theological debate. The notion of God being involved in and part of the historical process conflicted with traditional concepts of divine immutability and apatheia. Understood in Christological terms, this emphasis on God’s involvement in history raised the question of to what degree God was affected by the incarnation, for in the incarnation God had become a historical individual and thus participated in the historical process. Furthermore, if Jesus genuinely experienced a human life, as was becoming ever more evident from historical study of the Gospels, then like all human beings he too must have undergone a process of development. Idealist philosophy played a role in making the person of Christ increasingly an issue as the nineteenth century wore on. The person of Christ was the point at which the fundamental problems of the relation between time and eternity, the infinite and the finite, could be thought through. The pressing question for the theologian was how this philosophical picture of Christ could be brought into harmony with the Christ of the New Testament. Idealist philosophy also provided some of the terminology upon which theologians would draw in the construction of kenotic Christology. Of particular importance was Schelling’s concept of “potency.” By “potency,” Schelling means the powers of being that bring about the existence of reality and that through

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

253

their mutual interaction give reality its structure. Some kenotic theologians take up this notion and employ it to articulate the nature of the Godhead and to think through the capacity of the second person of the Trinity to incarnate himself. On this understanding, incarnation is the actualization of a potency that resides within the nature of the Logos. Two other factors helped create the climate in which kenotic Christology would flourish. Firstly, Pietism, with its emphasis on the sufferings of Jesus, prepared the ground for the acceptance of the notion of a suffering incarnate Logos. Secondly, although he himself rejected kenotic theology on the grounds that it undermined divine immutability, Isaak Dorner (1809–1884) provided several impulses for the development of kenotic Christology in his History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ (11839).2 This combination of factors created a climate in which theologians became prepared to conceive of Christ as the suffering Logos who gave up certain aspects or prerogatives of his divine nature in order to live a genuinely human life. This marks a development beyond the “kenosis-krypsis” debate that took place between the Lutheran theologians of Tübingen (Haffenreffer, Osiander, Nicolai, and Thummius) and Giessen (Mentzer, Feuerborn) in the early seventeenth century. Despite their differences, these theologians – those of both Tübingen and Giessen – agreed that the subject of the kenosis is the incarnate Logos (the logos ensarkos, the “enfleshed” Logos). Where they differed was in their view of the extent of the divine powers of the incarnate Logos. The Tübingen theologians argued for the concealment (krypsis, occultatio) but continued use of the divine powers, while the Giessen theologians proposed a “kenosis of use” (keno¯sis chre¯seo¯s), whereby Christ abstained from using some of his divine powers for the duration of the incarnation. The nineteenthcentury German kenoticists, however, understood the subject of the kenosis to be not the incarnate Christ but the pre-existent Logos (the logos asarkos, the “unfleshed” Logos). On this understanding, kenosis is the means by which the Logos adapts his divine person to a form capable of living a genuinely human existence, though without compromising anything essential to his divine nature. Developments in this direction can be traced in the 1830s in the writings of E. W. C. Sartorius (1797–1859). An early, undeveloped form of kenotic theology can also be found in the work of K. F. Gaupp, who in his Die Union (The Union; 11844, 21847) employs it as a means of providing a theological justification of the Prussian union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches.3 A more sustained, but largely uninfluential form of kenotic Christology was advanced in 1844 by J. L. König, who puts forwards a Hegelian-colored notion of kenosis as God’s self-finitization (Selbstverendlichung) into his Other.4 That kenosis was in the air in the 1840s is further indicated by the fact that kenotic elements can be found in an unpublished lecture on dogmatics given by J. C. K. Hofmann (1810–1877) in 1842. Hofmann would later take up these ideas in his notion of the incarnation as the Logos’ transition from eternal Trinitarian equality to historical Trinitarian inequality.5 It was, however, Gottfried Thomasius’s

254

DAVID R. LAW

publication in 1845 of his Ein Beitrag zur kirchlichen Christologie (A Contribution to Ecclesial Christology) that pushed the notion of kenosis to the forefront of theological debate.6 Thomasius’s essay was succeeded by a plethora of kenotic theologies, first in Germany and Switzerland, but later also in Scandinavia, Britain, and Russia. The fundamental problem kenotic theologians are concerned to address is: How can the divine, preexistent Logos become a human being and live a genuine human life without undermining his divine nature? This is the “kenotic” problem, which can be broken down into a series of other problems. 1. What is the impact on his divinity of the assumption by the Logos of human nature? The kenoticists address this question by considering what features of the divine nature the Logos renounces on becoming a human being. That is, what is the “object” of the kenosis? What was it of which the Logos “emptied” himself on becoming incarnate? Was it his entire divine nature or merely certain “nonessential” features of his divine nature, or did the Logos retain his divine nature but simply refrain from exercising his divine prerogatives? Alternatively, did the Logos merely conceal his divine powers, but continue to exercise them during his earthly existence? The different answers to the question of which aspects of the divine nature were renounced, and the degree to which they were renounced, accounts for the diversity of kenotic Christologies. 2. It is not only the conception of divinity that determines the understanding of kenosis, but also that of humanity. Kenotic Christologies are based on the presupposition that there is an affinity between divinity and humanity. If there were not such an affinity, then the Logos could not have assumed human form. But what is this affinity, and what is the impact of human sin upon it? 3. How does the kenosis affect the relations between the persons of the Trinity? Does it change the inner-Trinitarian relations or does it leave them unaffected? 4. Classical Christology has traditionally affirmed that the Logos is the agent and sustainer of creation. If the incarnate Logos has assumed a human consciousness, however, then in what way does he continue to exercise his duties of governing and sustaining the world without undermining the human consciousness he has assumed? On the other hand, if the Logos has limited himself by giving up these cosmic powers, what was happening to the universe during the thirty-year period of his earthly ministry? 5. How does the exalted Christ reappropriate the attributes he has renounced during his earthly ministry? If Christ has given up his divine attributes for the duration of his earthly ministry, then how can he take them up again on ascending to the Father?

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

255

6. What happens to Christ’s human nature in the state of exaltation? Does Christ discard his human nature on his ascension into heaven? Or does the exalted Christ take up his human nature into the Godhead? 7. How and in what way does the identity of the Logos remain the same throughout the three states through which he passes, namely, the state of preexistence, the status exinanitionis (state of humiliation, i.e., Christ’s earthly ministry), and the status exaltationis (state of exaltation)? The answers that kenotic theologians give to these questions vary considerably, which is why there is such a diversity of kenotic Christologies. The following is a brief survey of some of these Christologies.

Gottfried Thomasius, Kenosis as the Logos’ Renunciation of Relative Attributes Thomasius’s first attempt at the construction of a kenotic Christology appeared in his “Contribution to Ecclesial Christology” (1845). The criticisms of Dorner,7 Matthias Schneckenburger,8 and others led Thomasius to rethink this kenotic Christology and to reflect more deeply on its Trinitarian and anthropological consequences. This resulted in the publication of his magnum opus, the three-volume Christi Person und Werk (Christ’s Person and Work; 11853–1861; 21856–1863).9 As a member of the Erlangen School, Thomasius takes as his starting point the Christian’s present experience of salvation, the characteristic feature of which is the experience of an I-Thou relationship with God mediated through the person of Christ. Because believers experience their relationship with God as an I-Thou relationship, God can be conceived of in terms of personality. Unlike human persons, however, the divinity personality is unconditioned. Consequently, if we are to speak of God in terms of personality, then we must describe him as “absolute personality.”10 The notion of divine absolute personality can be broken down into three “determinations of essence” (Wesensbestimmtheiten).11 First, absolute personality is “absolute self-determination, or, since self-determination is will … absolute will.”12 Nothing other than God determines what God is. God is what he wills, and wills what he is. Consequently, the will of God can be understood as the “essence” or “root” of absolute personality. The second divine determination of essence is “selfconsciousness.” If God is absolute self-determination or will, then he must also be characterized by self-consciousness, for a will without consciousness is simply not a will. Since God cannot be absolute personality if he does not possess being or life, the third determination of essence is “being” or “absolute life.”13 The divine attributes arise from the relations between the essential determinations of divine absolute personality. To grasp Thomasius’s kenotic Christology, it is important to note that he holds that attributes do not belong to the essence of God, but arise from the relations between the internal distinctions within the

256

DAVID R. LAW

divine absolute personality.14 The internal relations between the essential determinations of absolute personality lead to the positing of the “immanent attributes,” which Thomasius defines as “the immanent determinations of absolute personality in relation to itself.”15 These immanent attributes are “absolute power or freedom,” “absolute intelligence,” and “absolute blessedness.”16 Absolute power should not be confused with omnipotence, which for Thomasius is a “relative” attribute by means of which God acts upon the world, but is rather, as Welch succinctly puts it, “the unconditioned power of will over itself.”17 Similarly, absolute intelligence is not omniscience, but is rather “the utterly unconditioned and perfect knowledge of God,” while absolute blessedness is God’s possession of full, perfect life and his consciousness of this possession.18 The divine absolute personality is the “presupposition” of the immanent Trinity19 and brings forth out of itself the Trinitarian persons as “acts of the absolute will.”20 This means that the hypostases are “distinct, independent persons in the one absolute personality,”21 between whom “an I-Thou relationship, a mutual willing, knowing, and living are enacted.”22 The absolute personality of God, then, is not identical with the Trinity. The Trinity is rather an expression of the internal relations between the essential determinations of the divine absolute personality. This distinction between absolute personality and the Trinitarian persons allows Thomasius to address the problem of both the unity and the distinctiveness of the Trinitarian persons. In absolute personality, essence and will are identical: God is what he wills. The unity of the three persons resides in the fact that they are all willed by the one united will of the absolute personality of God. The Trinitarian persons are, as it were, a secondary layer of divine self-differentiation brought forth from the will of absolute personality.23 The distinctiveness of the three persons is due to the fact that they are willed in different ways. Thomasius writes that “the will of the Father is the content of the hypostasis of the Son…. While the Father wills the Son, the Son wills himself as willed by the Father, consequently he wills himself not for his own sake but in order to devote himself to the Father.”24 The Holy Spirit is “the objective unity of the mutual willing” of both the Father and the Son.25 The absolute personality’s will to express itself in Trinitarian terms means that the attributes of absolute power, intelligence, and blessedness are now defined in Trinitarian terms and receive “a richer, more concrete content: they become holiness, truth, and love.”26 To this triad Thomasius adds absolute power, although this sits awkwardly with his argument that absolute power is an attribute of absolute personality. The attributes of holiness, truth, love, and absolute power are essential to the Godhead and cannot be given up without God ceasing to be God. For Thomasius, God operates in and on the world by means of what he calls the “relative” attributes, namely, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. These attributes are relative because they do not belong essentially to the absolute personality of God, but come into existence only through God’s

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

257

relation to the world he has created. If these attributes belonged to the very essence of God, God would be dependent on the world, for these attributes need an object upon which they can be exercised. Thomasius’s point can be seen most clearly with reference to omnipotence. Omnipotence cannot be exercised in a vacuum, but needs a world upon which it can exert itself. Consequently, if omnipotence were an immanent attribute, that is, an attribute that belonged to God’s very essence, then God’s independence of the world would be endangered, for he would need the world in order to be able to exercise the attribute of omnipotence.27 The distinction between immanent and relative attributes is thus necessary to avoid the conclusion that God is dependent upon the world.28 This distinction between immanent and relative attributes provides Thomasius with the foundation for developing his kenotic Christology in volume 2 of Christi Person und Werk. Christians’ present experience of redemption points back to an original saving event which has made this experience possible. That is, Christians’ experience of redemption is intelligible only if we posit the existence of a historical savior who brought about Christians’ present experience of communion with God. The person of the historical Christ is thus the “postulate of our communion with God.”29 This postulate of a historical savior is confirmed by the Gospels, which witness to the historical savior who made possible Christians’ present communion with God. The postulate of a historical savior leads in turn to the acceptance of the twonatures doctrine. Christ can mediate to Christians their communion with God only if he is “personally one” both with human beings and with God.30 Christ must be divine because only as divine can Christ overcome sin and restore the relationship between God and humanity. This restored communion with God can be a historical reality for human beings, however, only if Christ has himself entered human history as a real human being. Consequently, Christ must be both fully divine and fully human if he is to restore the broken communion between God and sinful humanity. The problem that prompts Thomasius to develop his kenotic Christology is: how is a union of divinity and humanity possible in the historical Christ without undermining either of the two natures? Thomasius addresses this question by means of the notion of the self-limitation of divinity in the incarnate Son of God. Only if the divine Logos willingly accepted a limitation of his divinity for the duration of the incarnation would it be possible for him to live a genuinely human existence. At the same time, however, this self-limitation must not undermine the fullness of the Logos’ divinity. The incarnation thus involves two actions. First, it involves the Logos’ selflimitation by his divesting himself of the relative attributes. On becoming incarnate the Logos freely gives up the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.31 Such attributes are incompatible with a genuinely human life, and thus the Logos renounces them in order to live as a human being. Consequently, Christ “did not actively rule the world at the same time that he walked on earth

258

DAVID R. LAW

as man, suffered and died,” nor was he “at the same time actually ruling over and governing the universe in a hidden way.32 Christ’s knowledge developed and matured during his earthly life according to his human capacity,33 and his preexistent omnipresence was reduced to the redemptive activity he undertook during his earthly ministry.34 The second action involved in the incarnation is the expression of the essential attributes of absolute power, holiness, truth, and love in a form consistent with human existence. Although kenosis consists in the renunciation of the relative attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, the incarnate Logos continues to possess the immanent attributes of absolute power, holiness, truth, and love. Consequently, even in the incarnate state the Logos “lacks nothing which is essential for God to be God.”35 Indeed, one of the purposes of the incarnation is the revelation of these immanent divine attributes.36 Kenosis, then, consists in the incarnate Logos’ renunciation of the relative attributes, and the continued retention and revelation of the immanent attributes. Because the relative attributes exist only in God’s relation to creation, they can be renounced without jeopardizing the divinity of the Logos.

K. T. A. Liebner, Kenosis as the Temporal Expression of the Eternal Inner-Trinitarian Relations Karl Theodor Albert Liebner (1806–1871) develops in Die christliche Dogmatik aus dem christologischen Princip dargestellt (Christian Dogmatics Portrayed on the Basis of the Christological Principle; 1849) a theology which, as the title of this work makes clear, takes as its starting point “the Christological principle.”37 Taking Christ as the starting point for dogmatics means that we have to think about the nature of both God and humanity. For Liebner the key to understanding the concept of God is love.38 Liebner, however, provides a highly metaphysical definition of love: “Love is self-communication. It is that wonderful really hypostatic self-transposition [Sichversetzen] into another hypostatic being, freely willing to have one’s being in the other subject, having oneself (i.e. will, freedom, power of self-determination), giving oneself, keeping one’s being not only in oneself, keeping it enclosed in oneself, but in openness giving oneself to the other, going out of oneself and being in the other, with the tendency of the full reciprocity of this act.”39 On the basis of this notion of love, Liebner claims that it is possible to derive the Trinitarian distinctions. As love, God requires an object upon which to exercise his love. He thus posits himself as the other in order that his love should have an object. This results in the positing of the second hypostasis. This second hypostasis, however, is itself God, for the object of God’s love must be identical in essence with God, otherwise God would not have an adequate object for his love. Liebner then goes on to argue that once the second hypostasis has been posited as the object of God’s love, it makes a similar though reverse move to that of the first hypostasis by finding in

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

259

the first hypostasis the object of its love. According to Liebner, this inner-divine relationship of reciprocal love is a mutual “eternal kenosis.”40 This mutual kenosis consists in the Son’s self-emptying in relation to the Father, and the Father’s eternal self-surrender to the Son. Father and Son exist in a relationship of reciprocity in which they mutually subordinate themselves to each other. The existence of the Holy Spirit can be deduced from the mutual kenosis of the first and second hypostases. According to Liebner, the “necessity of a third reality” arises because without a third hypostasis the mutual kenosis between the first and second hypostases would be “only an eternal to-and-fro, back-and-forth, an eternal restlessness.”41 The third hypostasis is the factor which prevents the first two hypostases from collapsing into each other and secures their independence over against each other. In order to perform this function, the Holy Spirit must himself be identical in essence with the other two hypostases. The eternal kenosis between Father and Son is the “key to Christology,”42 for the inner-Trinitarian subordination of the Son to the Father is “the eternal possibility of the incarnation.”43 The incarnation is simply the extension of the innerTrinitarian relation between Father and Son into time. As Liebner puts it, “In the primal act of the incarnation that eternal moment of the Trinitarian love of the Son in which the Son gives up his self-sufficiency in relation to the Father, becomes temporal.”44 The Logos is able to become a human being because of his fundamental affinity with human beings. Liebner argues for “the eternal primal humanity” (die ewige Urmenschheit) of the Logos45 and describes the second hypostasis as the “eternal divine humanity which is immanent in God [ewige göttliche, gottimmanente Menschheit].”46 According to Liebner, “The Trinitarian Logos already has a side which can be called eternal humanity. Humanity is created in his idea, one in essence with him – the world-idea with the telos of the personal creature as religious creature is conceived in him.”47 Furthermore, “The idea of humanity is: to be form, a vessel for God as its contents,”48 and human beings are characterized by their capacity for “receiving, having, possessing God.”49 The Logos is able to become a human being, then, because humanity is ultimately one in essence with the Logos and is created in order to be a receptacle for God. Consequently, the incarnation is not alien to the Son, but is the expression of an idea present in his preexistent state. The incarnation is the continuation of the inner-Trinitarian kenotic relationship of the Son to the Father and the expression of the idea of eternal primal humanity in the sphere of historical existence.50 In making the transition from eternity to temporality, the Son transforms himself into “Form” for the Father. That is, on becoming incarnate the Son completely empties himself into the Father, so that the Son has his divine being only by virtue of this relationship with the Father. Liebner emphasizes, “The Son is still Son, still distinct from the Father, not annihilated in the Father or united in a bad abstract identity … but he has his ontological contents only in and by virtue of the Father.”51 The Son is the form, while the Father is the content.

260

DAVID R. LAW

During the Son’s earthly ministry, the Father gradually communicates himself to the Son, so that the incarnate Son comes to be increasingly filled by the Father. This notion allows Liebner to deal with those passages in Scripture which speak of Christ’s development.52 As a result of the incarnation, the Son’s relationship with the world has undergone a change. He has renounced his omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and world governance in order to exercise in a divine-human mode of existence his work as redeemer. Although this redemptive work is in continuity with his role as world-governor, it nevertheless constitutes a different and deeper relation of God to the world. The consequence of the incarnation is that “the realm of nature has been completely appropriated by the realm of grace.” Liebner is not troubled by the charge that his theology undermines divine immutability, for it is a notion he rejects. According to Liebner, the doctrine of Trinity itself refutes the notion of immutability and shows that God must be conceived of in dynamic terms.53 That change occurs in God is indicated by the fact that the inner-Trinitarian subordination of the Father and Son has expressed itself in the sphere of temporality through the incarnation.54 Liebner takes this to be the meaning of those passages in Scripture which speak of the Son proceeding from the Father.55 Liebner deals with the problem of the relation between divine and human consciousnesses in Christ by arguing that Christ’s self-consciousness was a unified divine-human consciousness, but that this was initially reduced to a potency in the incarnate Logos. At the very beginning of the incarnate Logos’ earthly life, the divine-human self-consciousness was only latently present: “the incarnate Logos has in the absolute beginning really no actual self-consciousness, only the divine-human potency is present. He has his consciousness … in the Father, he is still lost in the Father.”56 In this initially unconscious state, the Son’s subordination to the Father has reached its most extreme point. As soon as Jesus awakes from his initial unconsciousness, however, he knows himself to be the God-man.57 Because the Logos has reduced himself to a potency, however, he is not able by means of his own powers to reawaken the divine fullness slumbering within him and requires the “mediation of the spirit.”58 For Liebner, Christ’s exaltation is the act of the entire Trinity, not merely an act by the Father or the Son alone.59

J. H. A. Ebrard, Kenosis as the Modification of Divine Attributes Although kenotic Christology was primarily a Lutheran phenomenon in nineteenth-century Germany, there were attempts by some Reformed theologians to develop forms of kenotic Christology. One of these theologians was Johannes Heinrich August Ebrard (1818–1888). Ebrard developed his Christology independently of Thomasius and kenotic features are evident in his thought before the publication of Thomasius’s

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

261

“Contribution to Ecclesial Christology.” In 1842, he published his Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte (Scientific Criticism of the History of the Gospels) as a response to Strauss’s The Life of Jesus.60 In an appendix to his discussion of Jesus’ childhood, Ebrard discusses the “biblical doctrine concerning the relation of divinity and humanity in Christ,”61 and it is here that he briefly sketches some of the leading ideas of the kenotic Christology he would later develop more fully in his Das Dogma vom heiligen Abendmahl und seine Geschichte (The Dogma of the Holy Eucharist and Its History; 1845–1846) and above all in his Christliche Dogmatik (Christian Dogmatics; 1851–1852).62 Ebrard warns against understanding the divine and human natures as “two subsistences or parts in Christ,” arguing that they should rather be conceived of as “two abstracta which are predicated of the one Christ.”63 Christ’s human nature does not subsist in itself, “but is a kind or form of being, not a concretum, but an abstractum.”64 Ebrard expresses his understanding of the divine and human natures in the following formula: “Divine nature: human nature = essence: existential form.”65 This means that the incarnation should not be understood as the union of two equal self-subsisting substances, but rather as the transition of the divine essence from eternal to temporal form. This exchange of the eternalform for the temporal-form is a renunciation not of the eternal essence, however, but only of the eternal form in which the eternal essence subsisted in the state of preexistence. In the incarnation the eternal essence remains intact but now subsists in the temporal-form of human existence. The Son’s transition from eternal existence-form to human existence-form is possible because temporality and spatiality are capable of being united with the divine essence. Indeed, it is the divine purpose that the whole of humanity should be permeated by the divine essence. Christ is simply the initiator of this process. Furthermore, an affinity exists between God and the human being, which stems from the fact that the human being is a “spiritual being which is eternal in itself,”66 and “an eternal ego which is infinite in itself.”67 Because of the affinity between God and humanity, it is not a violation of the divine essence for the Son of God to become a human being. The transition from eternity to existence is merely a transition from the eternal existence-form to the finite and temporal existence-form. This transition from eternal existence-form to temporal existence-form involves the Logos’ assumption of the form of a human soul, a soul which like all human souls began life in an unconscious, slumbering form. Despite this, the essence of the Logos remains unchanged. The divine essence and powers of the Logos remain present in the human consciousness of Jesus, although the infant Jesus was not initially aware of this. To justify these claims, Ebrard makes a distinction between the substance of personality and consciousness,68 and between personal unity and unity of consciousness. He claims that “unity of person still does not presuppose unity (i.e., continuity) of consciousness…. In any case, no human being is what he knows; the human being is always much more; the permanent, essential determinations of the personality are as a rule unconscious and enter the consciousness

262

DAVID R. LAW

only gradually. It is thus quite conceivable that the incarnate Logos bore within himself the entire fulness of his eternal determinations of essence without being conscious of them.”69 Just as human beings may possess certain talents and skills without initially being aware of them, so too is it conceivable that the slumbering soul of the infant Christ was in full possession of his divine powers without, however, yet being conscious of these powers. Like Thomasius, Ebrard distinguishes between immanent and relative attributes or, as he prefers to call them, ethical and metaphysical attributes. The difference between Ebrard and Thomasius is that Ebrard rejects Thomasius’s view that the metaphysical attributes are nonessential, relative attributes, which the Logos can renounce without impairing his divinity. For Ebrard, the attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience belong to the essence of God. They are therefore not given up when the Logos becomes incarnate, but move from subsisting in the eternal existence-form of divinity to the temporal existence-form of humanity. The Son’s exchange of his eternal existence-form for the temporal existence-form results not in the renunciation but the modification of his divine attributes. Omnipotence is expressed as Christ’s ability to perform miracles, while omnipresence is modified into independence of spatial limitations, so that Christ is able, for example, to walk on water. In the eternal existence-form, omniscience is God’s ability to know everything. In the temporal existence-form, it becomes Christ’s infallibility, which, in comparison with the flawed knowledge of sinful human beings, is “an absolutely supernatural” knowledge.70 Ebrard insists that the incarnate Logos has not renounced his world-rule, but continues to exercise his cosmic functions at a subconscious level in the incarnate Christ. Like many other kenotic theologians, Ebrard also argues that in the temporal existence-form the cosmic powers of the Logos have been modified into his worldredeeming activity.

W. F. Gess, Kenosis as the Reduction of the Logos to a Human Soul Perhaps the most influential and controversial of the Reformed kenoticists is Wolfgang Friedrich Gess (1819–1891), who some commentators claim advances the most consistent form of kenotic Christology.71 Gess develops his kenotic Christology in two works, namely, Die Lehre von der Person Christi (The Doctrine of the Person of Christ; 1856) and the three-volume Christi Person und Werk (Christ’s Person and Work; 1870–1887).72 It is his aim in these works to construct a Christology that is based solely on the witness of Scripture. Gess is critical of the Chalcedonian Definition because of its docetic consequences,73 among which he includes the immutability of the Logos, a notion which for Gess is “only a theological regulation, not a canon of Christ, Paul, or John.”74 For Gess it is not the Chalcedonian Definition but the witness of Scripture that creates the kenotic problem. He writes, “Regarded purely exegetically, there is no more certain result of the interpretation of Scripture than

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

263

the statement that the ego of Jesus on earth was identical with the ego which had previously existed in glory with the Father.”75 Gess declares it to be a further result of scriptural research that the Son has undergone a process of becoming, and that in the incarnation there took place a change in the Son’s condition.76 For Gess the incarnation consists in the Son’s transition from the state of being “self-positing” (Sichselbstsetzen) to the state of “being posited” (Gesetztsein). As he puts it, the Son “has proceeded from the life of one who posits himself to the life of one who is posited.”77 Gess’s explanation of how the Logos makes this transition lacks clarity, however, for he writes, “The Logos will be able to pass from being self-posited [aus dem sich selbst Setzen] to being-posited [in das Gesetztsein] precisely because he is absolutely the self-positing one [schlechthin der sich selbst Setzende].”78 To support his argument Gess turns to the theory of creationism, that is, the view that at the moment of the conception of a human body, God creates an individual human soul for each respective body. In Jesus’ case the Logos took the place of this human soul.79 Gess sees the advantage of his theory to be as follows: “The insertion of a rational human soul between the Logos and his corporeality becomes unnecessary.”80 Consequently, his Christology is not confronted with the problem of the “double personality” of the incarnate Logos. What is controversial about Gess’s theory is his view that the Logos reduced himself to what was compatible with existence as a human soul. This means that the Logos allowed his consciousness to be initially extinguished in order to become a human being. Gess writes, “The Son would also not really have been identical to us if he had not begun his earthly life with the night of unconsciousness.”81 It is only at a certain stage of physical maturity that Jesus’ self-consciousness begins to flash through. From then on, there takes place in Jesus a human development with the goal of sanctification, a goal that is achieved step by step in the choices Jesus freely makes.82 Gess further argues that a change has taken place in the Trinity for the duration of the incarnate Logos’ earthly life. The eternal generation of the Son by the Father is suspended and the Spirit no longer proceeds from both the Father and the Son, but from the Father alone. The notion of kenosis as the reduction of the Logos to a human soul had several supporters besides Gess. Shortly before the publication of Gess’s Lehre von der Person Christi, Georg Ludwig Hahn (1823–1903) advanced a kenotic Christology that has Gessian characteristics. On the basis of John 1:14, Hahn argues that on becoming incarnate the Logos did not assume human nature but human corporeality.83 In assuming human corporeality, the “absolute pneuma” which is the Logos reduced itself to a state of potency in order to enter the mode of being of a limited spirit. This is not a renunciation of divinity, however, for even as a limited spirit the essence of the incarnate Logos continues to be divine pneuma. Later representatives of Gessian-type kenotic Christology are Friedrich Reiff (1827–1894),84 Augustin Grétillat (1837–1894),85 and Frédéric Godet (1812–1900).86

264

DAVID R. LAW

F. H. R. Frank, Kenosis as the Unifying [Ineinssetzung] of the Depotentiated Consciousness of the Son with Human Consciousness Like Thomasius, Franz Hermann Reinhold Frank (1827–1894) follows Lutheran orthodoxy in accepting the Chalcedonian Definition that Christ is two natures in one person.87 He also shares Thomasius’s view that neither the Chalcedonian Definition nor the Lutheran confessions built upon it are set in stone, but must be updated in view of modern theological developments. To affirm classical Christology while correcting its inadequacies, Frank, like Thomasius, turns to the notion of kenosis. Like other representatives of the Erlangen School, Frank takes as his starting point the Christian’s present experience of redemption. In his System der christlichen Gewissheit (System of the Christian Certainty; 1870–1873), Frank is concerned primarily with securing the “objects of faith,” namely, Christ’s work and person, and the doctrine of the Trinity, by showing how they can be deduced from Christian experience.88 In this work, Frank focuses only on establishing the “facts of the God-man” and does not address the problem of “the how of the subject-unity.” This is a task for dogmatics,89 a task to which Frank turns in System der christlichen Wahrheit (System of the Christian Truth; 11878–1880, 2 1885–1886). The question of how the unity of divine and human natures is possible in Christ leads Frank to reflect on the nature of divinity and humanity, respectively. According to Frank, God is absolute personality who in positing himself as a threefold egoity (Ichheit) brings forth out of himself the Trinitarian persons.90 This threefold self-positing means that there exists within the divine absolute personality both positedness (Gesetztsein), for each of the three egoities is posited, and conditionedness (Bedingtsein), for each egoity is conditioned by the other two egoities. For Frank it belongs to the distinctive special hypostatic character of the second Trinitarian person to be conditioned by the Father. The possibility of the incarnation stems from the fact that, as conditioned, the Son is able to take upon himself the conditionedness of a finite, human existence. The incarnation is simply the continuation of the Father’s conditioning of the Son, but transposed to the sphere of temporality. There is thus no discontinuity between the preexistent and incarnate Logos. Human nature is likewise no hindrance to the capacity of the second hypostasis to incarnate himself. Human nature is capable of being assumed by the Logos because human beings have been made in the image and likeness of God.91 There also exists in human beings a parallel to the self-positing (Selbstsetzung) and positedness (Gesetztheit) that takes place in the Trinity. The difference between divine and human personhood lies in the fact that whereas the selfpositing of the personality of God is unconditioned and absolute, in the human being there is only a “Self-positing on the basis of positedness” (Selbstsetzung auf Grund von Gesetztheit).92 Another indication of the compatibility of human

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

265

nature with divinity is the unio mystica of believers, which for Frank is the human parallel or image of the hypostatic union of the incarnate Son. The unio mystica reveals the capacity of the human personality with its finite consciousness to take up into itself the infinite content of the divine self-consciousness.93 It is these features of the human being that comprise the imago Dei and constitute an analogy between the divine absolute personality and the personality of the human being.94 For the second hypostasis to become incarnate, it must adapt its divine attributes so that they can become compatible with a genuinely human existence. Kenosis consists not in the Son’s divestment of certain attributes, however, but in the “Transposition [Umsetzung] of his eternal consciousness as Son into the form of a finite human consciousness subject to temporal becoming.”95 This transposition consists of two elements. First, it involves a “self-depotentiation” (Selbstdepotenzierung).96 The Logos depotentiates his divine Logos-consciousness to the level of a human personality.97 Second, kenosis is the “Ineinssetzung of divine and human consciousness.”98 That is, kenosis is the “positing-into-a-unity” or unifying of divine and human consciousness. Kenosis, then, consists in the Logosconsciousness having depotentiated itself to the point where it is able to posit itself as one (ineinssetzen) with the human, finite consciousness. Frank repeatedly emphasizes that the kenosis does not compromise the continuity of identity of the Logos. The Logos remains the same subject in the form of temporal, finite, human consciousness as he was in the state of preexistence. If this were not the case, then we would not encounter God in the incarnate Son, for the incarnate Son would no longer be identical in essence with God. For Frank it is not the attributes or the essence, but only the “form” of the Son’s consciousness that has changed in the incarnation. The incarnation brings about a change only in the way the Son’s consciousness subsists, but leaves his essence unchanged. The hypostatic union consists in the forming into one another (Ineinanderbildung) of the contents of the human and divine consciousnesses. It is noteworthy that Frank speaks not of a double consciousness, but of the double contents of consciousness. The incarnate Logos is not two consciousnesses, but a single consciousness with human and divine contents. Frank’s notion of the double contents of consciousness united in the person of the incarnate, depotentiated Logos is confronted by several problems, however. How are double contents of consciousness possible in a single ego? If Christ has a human, finite consciousness, then how can he simultaneously be conscious of his eternal, preexistent divine Sonship and still remain genuinely human? Consciousness of preexistence, after all, is not normally a feature of human personhood. Frank attempts to deal with these problems by arguing that Christ is conscious of his divinity not in a divine but in a human way, namely, by faith. Christ, then, does not know that he is divine but believes himself to be so on the basis of his human faith.99 Frank thus tries to unite Christ’s human faith with his consciousness of preexistence by arguing that this consciousness of his divine origin is a matter of faith for Christ.

266

DAVID R. LAW

The Logos’ self-potentiation to the level of a human personality and the union in the depotentiated Logos of the contents of divine and human consciousnesses result in the transformation of the divine attributes into what is compatible with human existence. Thus the depotentiated Logos develops his consciousness from potentiality to actuality, from a sleeping consciousness to a clear consciousness.100 Frank deals with the problem of the incarnate Logos’ cosmic powers in the broader context of God’s general relation to the world and history.101 Since space and time are “Ektypa,” likenesses or copies, of the Trinitarian relations,102 God’s creation and action in the world are consistent with his divine nature rather than violations of it. Furthermore, God is the “principle of becoming” (Werdeprincip) of history, a principle which moves into a new and higher form in the person of Jesus Christ. Consequently, the incarnation does not compromise the divinity of the Logos, but is a continuation and fuller expression of God’s involvement with the world. Just as the creation and preservation of the world do not entail a change in God’s essence, so too does God’s entry into the world as the incarnate Logos not impair his divinity. The latter is simply a special form of the former. Consequently, the incarnation does not indicate a change or impairment of God’s divine essence but is rather the expression of the eternal divine will.

The Kenosis of Use In his early work, Karl Friedrich August Kahnis (1814–1888) advances a Christology similar to that of Gess, arguing that with the incarnation the consciousness of the Logos underwent “finitization” (Verendlichung). In Jesus’ childhood the consciousness of the Logos was present only “latently” but gradually developed during Jesus’ earthly ministry as he gradually became conscious of his preexistent glory as Logos.103 Kahnis came to have misgivings about this theory, however, and in his later work presents a theory that has more in common with Thomasius than Gess. Kahnis’s mature Christology is based on a subordinationist doctrine of the Trinity. Kahnis believes that Trinitarian theology took a wrong turn after Augustine, whom he accuses of the “heresy” of “co-ordinationism,”104 and argues for a return to pre-Nicene Trinitarianism, which he holds was subordinationist in character. For Kahnis, the Father is “God in the unique sense of the Word,” and is the divine “primal personality” (Urpersönlichkeit) from which the Son and the Spirit proceed. The Son, however, is God only in a derived way and receives his divine glory from the Father. Consequently, he is not God in the unique sense but is only “God by predication.”105 Because the Son is dependent on the Father, when the Son becomes incarnate this has no significant effect on the inner Trinitarian relations. The incarnation is simply the continuation of the Son’s subordination to the Father in the realm of existence. Consequently, the Father remains unaffected in his immutability. It is precisely because the Son has himself come into existence through being

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

267

generated by the Father that he is subject to becoming.106 Because he himself is the product of and is subject to becoming, he is able to enter the realm of becoming and become a human being. In his later Christology Kahnis follows Thomasius in arguing for a distinction between relative and immanent divine attributes. Unlike Thomasius, however, he rejects the suggestion that the relative attributes can be renounced by the incarnate Logos. For Kahnis, both types of attribute are equally essential and cannot be given up without impairing the divinity of the Logos.107 He suggests that the incarnate Logos does not renounce but only withholds the use of his divine attributes. This means that in the human being Jesus, divine nature is present only in a “relative condition of latency.”108 During the incarnation the Logos withdrew into a condition of potency and temporarily renounced his relation to the world. In support of this kenotic formula Kahnis repeatedly appeals to Irenaeus’s statement that the Logos was quiescent during Jesus’ temptation.109 In his later kenotic Christology, then, Kahnis has arrived at a kenosis of use, but in contrast to the notion advanced by the seventeenth-century Giessen theologians Kahnis understands the subject of the kenosis not to be the logos ensarkos but the logos asarkos. The withholding of the exercise of the divine attributes is the means by which the Logos is able to assume human nature and live a genuinely human life. This prompts Kahnis to replace his earlier notion of the finitization of the consciousness of the Logos with the view that the personhood of the Logos has united itself in indissoluble unity with the self-consciousness of human nature. In doing so, “the uncreated ego of the Logos has taken up into itself in personal unity a creaturely ego.” The result of this is that “the ego of Logos is simultaneously a human ego, the human ego simultaneously the ego of the Logos.”110 Kahnis seems to be advancing prior to Frank something like the latter’s notion of the Ineinssetzung of the divine and human ego. Another proponent of a type of kenosis of use is Christoph Ernst Luthardt (1823–1902). In his early work, Luthardt follows the theology of his teacher Hofmann, arguing that the transition of the Logos into a human being was only a “modification” of his “condition” (Zuständlichkeit) without thereby impairing his essential divinity.111 In his later works, however, Luthardt moves away from Hofmann’s position and develops a theology that resembles that of Kahnis. Like Kahnis and in contrast to Thomasius, Luthardt holds that in order to become incarnate the Logos did not divest himself of the relative divine attributes, but merely renounced their use, while continuing to possess them potentially. Complete renunciation of the relative attributes is not possible, because in the incarnation the Logos continues to sustain a relation to the world, albeit a different one from that sustained in his state of preexistence. The Son has limited his relation to the world only in so far as such limitation is demanded by the divine love he reveals and is required by his “vocation” as Redeemer.112 Luthardt finds the foundations for the Son’s self-limitation and reduction of himself to potentiality in God’s action of creating free personalities, which is itself a self-limitation on God’s part.113

268

DAVID R. LAW

A related theory to the kenosis of use is the theory of kenosis as concentration advanced by Alexander von Oettingen (1827–1905) in his Lutherische Dogmatik (Lutheran Dogmatics), a notion which can be found in an underdeveloped form in Thomasius.114 Oettingen holds that the Lutheran theologians of the seventeenth century failed to follow through with the insights of Luther’s theologia crucis. The result of this, coupled with their underdeveloped conception of kenosis, resulted in the incorporation of a docetic element into their Christology.115 Oettingen addresses this alleged inadequacy by developing the notion of incarnation as “concentration.” On becoming incarnate the Logos renounced the full actualization of his divine attributes and limited their use to his world-redeeming work. This is no denial of divinity, however, for in the lowliness of Christ there takes place “an intensive concentration” of the self-witness of God.116 This “self-concentration” (Selbstconcentration) of the Logos is not the renunciation of possession of the divine nature or attributes, however, but only of the use of the divine glory and power.117 Although during Christ’s earthly ministry the self-consciousness of the Logos was “temporarily quiescent,”118 he still retained the potential use of his divine glory and power. Other versions of the theory of the kenosis of use were advanced by Franz Karl Ludwig Steinmeyer (1811–1900),119 August Friedrich Christian Vilmar (1800–1868),120 and Adolf von Stählin (1823–1897).121

British Kenotic Christologies Although in Germany kenotic theology increasingly gave way from the 1880s to Ritschlianism, it experienced a second flowering in Great Britain between circa 1880 and 1930. The delay of the arrival of kenoticism was due to a combination of factors. Poor theological education, fear of German thought, and concern with other issues, especially ecclesiology, coupled with a generally conservative attitude prevented wide circulation of German ideas in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was only in the second half of the century that the intellectual conditions that led to the rise of kenoticism in Germany were reproduced in Britain. Several factors seem to have brought this about. The notion of development became an important issue in British theological thought as a result of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) and Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). This raised questions concerning to what degree Christ himself was subject to the laws of development. Finally, after 1860 German philosophy began to make increasing inroads into British thought. The Hegelian notion that God himself was progressively expressing himself in ever richer forms in human history, reaching a climax in the person of Christ, reinforced the growing tendency to apply the notion of development to theological concerns. The emphasis on feeling and emotion that characterized the Romantic movement led to an increasing focus on the nature of faith, and deeper concern with the role of feeling and emotion in the formation of faith. This is evident in

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

269

Newman’s Grammar of Assent, while the latter half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of psychology as a distinct academic discipline and increasing emphasis on the notion of personality. Such works as Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology (1855) witness to this development. By the turn of the century there was increasing concern among Anglican theologians with notions of psychology and personality, especially with Jesus’ personality.122 The most important factor in the development of British kenotic theology, however, was the belated arrival of biblical criticism. Despite resistance to biblical criticism in the early part of the nineteenth century, historical approaches to the Bible did gradually make inroads into the British theological consciousness. An important role was played by the publication in 1846 of George Eliot’s translation of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, which helped to make the British public aware of the results of German critical biblical scholarship. Another work which helped biblical criticism to penetrate the Anglican consciousness was Robert William Mackay’s The Tübingen School and Its Antecedents (1863).123 In the 1870s and 1880s, the biblical criticism pioneered by German scholars began increasingly to influence British interpretation of the Bible. As had been the case earlier in the century in Germany, the results of biblical criticism created in British theological circles a sharper consciousness of the humanity of Christ and how he had been influenced by his cultural environment. This raised the problem of how the picture of Jesus emerging from historical criticism was to be reconciled with the Christ of traditional Christian doctrine. A major source of knowledge of German kenoticism in Britain was the English translation of Isaak Dorner’s History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ.124 Another influential work in introducing the British public to kenotic theology was the publication in 1876 of A. B. Bruce’s The Humiliation of Christ.125 The best-known kenoticist in the English-speaking world seems to have been the Swiss Reformed theologian Frédéric Godet, whose Gessian version of kenotic theology was introduced to English-language readers by the English translation of many of his writings, but above all by his Commentary on the Gospel of St. John.126 It was, however, not until 1889 with the publication of Charles Gore’s (1853– 1932) essay on “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration” in Lux Mundi that kenosis became a significant theological issue in Anglican theology. The kenotic question emerges in the course of Gore’s discussion of the problematic material in the Scriptures.127 Gore notes that Christ, like his Jewish contemporaries, assumed the Davidic authorship of Psalm 110, but modern biblical criticism has shown that it is unlikely that David was the author of this psalm. This raises the problem of how Christ’s apparently erroneous belief in Davidic authorship can be reconciled with the traditional conception of Christ’s divinity. Gore addresses this problem by briefly introducing the notion of kenosis: “The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to reveal himself under conditions of human nature and from the human

270

DAVID R. LAW

point of view.” This insight allows us to distinguish between what Christ revealed and what Christ used. Christ revealed God, the true nature of human beings, and the purpose of redemption, but did so “through, and under conditions of, a true human nature.” This means, Gore goes on to write, that Christ “used human nature, its relation to God, its conditions of experience, its growth in knowledge, its limitation of knowledge.” This distinction allows us to distinguish between statements where Christ is employing his human nature and those where he is speaking in his divine nature. Thus, when Christ “speaks of the ‘sun rising’ He is using ordinary human knowledge.” In speaking thus, Christ is restraining his divinity: “He willed so to restrain the beams of Deity as to observe the hints of the science of His age, and He puts Himself in the same relation to its historical knowledge. He never exhibits the omniscience of bare Godhead in the realm of natural knowledge.”128 Gore’s claim that Christ’s knowledge was limited by his human nature proved to be highly controversial and provoked numerous writings in opposition. In April 1890 the first of several anonymous articles, later revealed to have been written by Darwell Stone (1859–1941), was published in The Church Quarterly Review, attacking Gore’s position. Further attacks were also made by Bishop Ellicott of Gloucester and Bristol in his book Christus Comprobator129 and H. C. Powell in The Principle of the Incarnation (1896).130 There were more critical articles in The Church Quarterly Review, and in 1898 the American scholar F. J. Hall published his full-scale critical study of Anglican forms of kenotic theology.131 It was in part to meet the attacks made upon his argument in his Lux Mundi essay that Gore returned to the question of kenosis in his Bampton lectures of 1891 and again in his Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation (1895).132 This latter work is Gore’s fullest exposition of his thinking on kenosis and is arguably the most important expression of the first generation of British kenotic Christology. Gore’s was followed by a plethora of works affirming kenosis to a greater or lesser degree.133 It was not only in Anglicanism that kenoticism came to be an important theological force in nineteenth-century British theology. In his The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, A. M. Fairbairn adopts a kenotic theory which closely resembles that of Thomasius, though without acknowledgment.134 P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921) and H. R. Mackintosh also develop forms of kenotic Christology (1870–1936).135 The next generation of Anglican scholars also took up the notion of kenosis in the construction of their Christologies. Although he dislikes the term “kenosis” because of its associations with what he regards as heterodox continental theologies, Frank Weston develops in his One Christ (11907, 21914) one of the most rigorous and well-thought-out Anglican kenotic Christologies. Weston argues that what is needed is a Christology which takes the divine ego under the conditions of human limitation as its basis. Weston attempts to provide such a Christology by arguing that the subject of the incarnate Christ is the limited Logos. Weston’s “insight” is that a human ego is not necessary for the exercise

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

271

of human functions. It is possible for the nonhuman ego of the Logos to exercise human functions, resolving to limit himself according to the restricted mode of being experienced by a human ego. The Logos, then, does not assume human personhood but restrains or limits his divine being to the point where it becomes compatible with human personhood. He remains the divine Logos, but a selfrestrained and self-limited Logos that expresses himself only through the medium of the human nature which he has assumed. The obvious criticism of this Christology is that it is Apollinarian. To defend himself against this charge Weston examines in some detail the nature of personhood. The human being has a twofold nature comprising body and soul. The body consists of the material media through which the human being manifests him or herself in the world, and is the agent of the soul’s powers. Both body and soul imply “a hidden Actor whom both reveal.”136 This “Actor” is the “Reality in whom soul and body form a composite being, and who at the same time is distinct from both.” The term we employ to describe this active reality in which soul and body are combined is “the Self, or Person, or Ego, of manhood.”137 Personhood, however, is more than merely the sum total of the component elements that comprise human nature. Indeed, for Weston personhood is not built up out of the elements of body and soul but is their foundation. He emphasizes that “the ‘I’ is not the soul, nor the body, nor the composition of the two, but the ground in which both subsist.”138 Armed with this understanding of personhood, we are now in a position to grasp the Eternal Word’s assumption of human nature. The Word did not assume human personhood, for this would entail the assumption of an ego other than his own. If he had done so, the Logos would either have redeemed only that human person with whom he united himself or would have been compelled to annihilate the personhood of the human nature which he assumed. The only way around these problems, Weston argues, is to conclude that the Word did not assume human personhood, but assumed a human body and soul as the media through which to express his divine personhood. This understanding of the incarnation explains how Christ can possess divine and human wills and yet still be a single, unified person. For Weston, “will” is not a synonym for “person” or “self-consciousness.” Rather, the will is an attribute of the soul and thus is a function exercised by a person. As a divine incarnate person, Christ exercises the human will that belongs to the human nature he has assumed. There is no conflict between the divine and human wills because it is one person who is doing the willing, albeit in two different natures with two different, though harmonious, wills. So Christ has two wills, but is not two persons. The divine attributes are not abandoned but restrained by the incarnate Logos. This restraint does not constitute a renunciation of attributes, however. Thus the incarnate Logos remains omniscient, but this omniscience is now mediated through his humanity. He continues to possess divine foreknowledge, but this is now limited to what is possible within the confines of human nature. Nor does the incarnate Logos renounce omnipresence. Rather, this omnipresence, which

272

DAVID R. LAW

Weston understands in terms of the set of relationships the Logos sustains with his creatures, is mediated through his human nature. Similarly, Christ’s omnipotence is not undermined, but is now expressed as the freely willed and loving limitation of the Logos in a genuinely human existence. Weston writes that the Son of God “has come Himself, and by an act of supreme love and power He so measures His divine power that He can adequately serve as the proper subject or ego of His assumed manhood.”139 Weston emphasizes that the Son’s self-restraint was not a temporary measure. For Weston, Christ’s humanity may never be laid aside, for the will of the Logos to accept the law of self-restraint was a permanent resolution. This means that humanity remains in place even in Christ’s ascended, glorified state. If this were not the case, if Christ had discarded his humanity at his exaltation, then the Logos would not have genuinely taken up human nature. A further reason why the Logos cannot lay aside his humanity on his exaltation is that it would entail his giving up his saving relationship with creation, which during his earthly ministry was mediated exclusively through his humanity. Consequently, “viewed as a state [the incarnation] is never completed, never finished; for it is the sum of the relationships of the Incarnate with manhood, with men, and with His Father in heaven. These relationships will never cease: they are everlasting in the Father’s love.”140 Thus Weston concludes that it is a richer thought that self-limitation is continuous from conception onward. “In time and through eternity the Christ is God the Son, self-limited in manhood.”141

The Fall and Rise of Kenotic Christologies Kenotic theology petered out as a major force in Germany in the 1880s, while by the 1930s British kenoticism was largely a spent force. The decline of kenosis theory can be attributed to a combination of factors. The intense debate in Germany had exposed weaknesses in the kenotic Christologies of individual theologians. Thomasius’s distinction between immanent and relative divine attributes came under considerable criticism. Arguably, the relative attributes must be inherent in the immanent attributes. If they are not connected with the divine essence in some way, then it is difficult to see how they can be conceived of as divine. Yet if they are connected with the divine essence or dependent on the immanent attributes, then it is difficult to see how the Logos can renounce them without his ceasing to be divine. Gessian-type Christologies, which hold that the incarnate Logos was initially unconscious and only acquired consciousness of his divine status in the course of his earthly ministry, have severe consequences for the Trinity, which would seem to be reduced to two persons at least at the beginning of the incarnate Logos’ earthly existence. Subordinationist kenotic Christologies, such as that of Liebner, which seek to integrate kenosis into the inner-Trinitarian relations, are confronted

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

273

by the problem that if the Son is a subordinate, secondary God, then it is doubtful whether he can function as the revealer of God in all his fullness. Further problems emerge with regard to the question of the limitation of the divine attributes during the incarnation. The issue is whether it makes any sense to speak of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, if these attributes have been accommodated to what is compatible with temporal existence. The apparent impossibility of solving the problems of kenotic Christology prompted theologians to look for alternative ways of addressing the challenges of theology. There were developments in the broader theological scene which led to a decline in kenotic Christology. In Germany the theology of Albrecht Ritschl caught the imagination of a new generation of theologians. With its emphasis on theological statements as value judgments, Ritschlianism seemed to offer a way of addressing theological questions that undercut the highly complex metaphysical systems constructed by the kenoticists. It also appealed to those generally critical of classical Christology with its doctrine of preexistence and affirmation of the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in Christ. In Britain the decline of kenoticism may be attributed to the increasing influence from the 1920s onward of form criticism, which raised questions about the validity of the way kenotic theologians handled Scripture. Form criticism’s analysis of the text into its smallest component parts and its exploration of how the material of the Gospels was not originally a continuous, historical narrative, but had been built up out of small units of oral tradition, made it difficult to employ the Gospels to construct a picture of Christ’s psychology and the development of his consciousness of his divine status. There was also increasing disquiet concerning the metaphysical consequences of kenotic Christology. These concerns are well expressed by William Temple, who writes, The difficulties are intolerable. What was happening to the rest of the universe during the period of our Lord’s earthly life? To say that the Infant Jesus was from His cradle exercising providential government over it all is certainly monstrous; but to deny this, and yet to say that the Creative Word was so self-emptied as to have no being except in the Infant Jesus, is to assert that for a certain period the world was let loose from the control of the creative Word, and “apart from Him” very nearly everything happened that happened at all during thirty odd years, both on this planet, and throughout the immensities of space.142

As a consequence of such criticisms, British theologians began to look for new ways of doing theology that avoided the apparently insoluble problems of kenotic Christology. Kenotic Christology has never completely disappeared from the theological landscape, however. In the twentieth century it became an important strand in Russian Orthodox thinking, above all in the work of Michail Tareev (1866–1934) and Sergius Bulgakov (1905–1988). Despite Roman Catholic criticism of

274

DAVID R. LAW

kenotic Christology at the turn of the twentieth century,143 kenotic theology has been taken up by some Roman Catholic theologians, most notably by Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988). In the last decades of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, there has been a renewal of interest in the notion of kenosis, particularly in the idea of God’s relation to the world being fundamentally kenotic in nature.144 Although kenotic Christology is unlikely to achieve the dominance it once had in mid-nineteenth-century Germany and late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Britain, it seems likely that it will continue to provide resources for theologians who wish to think deeply about the nature of God’s relation to the world and his deepest expression of that relation in the incarnation of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Notes Unless stated otherwise, all translations are the author’s. 1 David Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1836); ET: The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846); and Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampf mit der modernen Wissenschaft dargestellt (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1840– 1841). 2 Isaak August Dorner, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die neuesten (Stuttgart: Liesching, 1839). 3 Karl Friedrich Gaupp, Die Union, 2nd partially rev. ed. (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1847), esp. 98–117. 4 Johann Ludwig König, Die Menschwerdung Gottes als eine in Christus geschehene und in der christlichen Kirche noch geschehende (Mainz: Zabern, 1844). 5 See above all J. C. K. von Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis. Ein theologischer Versuch, vols. I–II/2 (Nördlingen, C. H. Beck, 11852–1855, 21857–1860). 6 Gottfried Thomasius, “Ein Beitrag zur kirchlichen Christologie,” Zeitschrift fürProtestantismus und Kirche, new series, vol. 9 (1845): 1–30, 65–110, 218–258. 7 Isaak August Dorner, review of G. Thomasius, “Beiträge zur kirchlichen Christologie,” Allgemeines Repertorium für die theologische Literatur und kirchliche Statistik, new series, vol. 5 (1846): 33–50. 8 Matthias Schneckenburger, review of G. Thomasius, “Ein Beitrag zur kirchlichen Christologie,” in Litterarischer Anzeiger für die christliche Theologie und Wissenschaft überhaupt, ed. by F. A. Tholuck (Halle, 1846), first half-volume, cols. 129–132, 137– 144, 147–152. 9 Gottfried Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk. Darstellung der evangelisch-lutherischen Dogmatik vom Mittelpunkte der Christologie aus, 3 vols. (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1 1853–1861; 21856–1863). References are to the second edition. 10 Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, I:12. 11 Ibid., I:52. 12 Ibid., I:19. 13 Ibid., I:19. 14 Ibid., I:48, I:52.

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

275

15 Ibid., I:48. 16 Ibid., I:54. 17 Claude Welch (ed.), God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 68–69 n. 11. 18 Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, I:54. 19 Ibid., I:109. 20 Ibid., I:105. 21 Ibid., I:106; cf. II:293. 22 Ibid., I:69. 23 Ibid., II:293. 24 Ibid., I:108–109. 25 Ibid., I:109. 26 Ibid., I:137, cf. I:43. 27 Ibid., I:52. 28 Ibid., II:242, cf. II:546. 29 Ibid., II:143. 30 Ibid., II:8. 31 Ibid., II:241–242. 32 Ibid., II:238. 33 Ibid., II:239. 34 Ibid., II:239. 35 Ibid., II:242. 36 Ibid., II:237. 37 K. T. A. Liebner, Die christliche Dogmatik aus dem christologischen Princip dargestellt, vol. I/1: Christologie oder die christologische Einheit des dogmatischen Systems (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1849). 38 Liebner, Die christliche Dogmatik, 54. 39 Ibid., 111–112. 40 Ibid., 151, 330. 41 Ibid., 130. 42 Ibid., 149. 43 Ibid., 150. 44 Ibid., 345. 45 Ibid., 53, 54. 46 Ibid., 153; also 290, 163. 47 Ibid., 319. 48 Ibid., 271. 49 Ibid., 270. 50 Ibid., 284–285. 51 Ibid., 153. 52 Ibid., 341. 53 Ibid., 349. 54 Ibid., 332. 55 Ibid., 322–323. 56 Ibid., 310. 57 Ibid., 310. 58 Ibid., 310.

276

DAVID R. LAW

59 Ibid., 344. 60 J. H. A. Ebrard, Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Heinrich Zimmer, 1842). Published in English under the title The Gospel History: A Compendium of Critical Investigations in Support of the Historical Character of the Four Gospels, rev. and ed. Alexander B. Bruce, trans. James Martin (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1863). 61 Ebrard, Wissenschaftliche Kritik, 271–278. 62 Ebrard, Das Dogma vom heiligen Abendmahl und seine Geschichte, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a. M: Heinrich Zimmer, 1845–46); and Ebrard, Christliche Dogmatik, 2 vols. (Königsberg: August Wilhelm Unzer, 11851–1852, 21862–1863). References here are to the second edition. 63 Ebrard, Christliche Dogmatik, II:44. 64 Ibid., II:44. 65 Ibid., II:44. 66 Ibid., I:6. 67 Ibid., I:7. 68 Ibid., II:37. 69 Ibid., II:148. 70 Ibid., II:31. 71 Martin Breidert, Die kenotische Christologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1977), 115. 72 W. F. Gess, Die Lehre von der Person Christi (Basel: Bahnmaiers Buchhandlung (C. Detlof), 1856); and W. F. Gess, Christi Person und Werk, 3 vols. (vol. I: Calw: Verlag der Vereinsbuchhandlung, 1870; vols. II–III: Basel: Bahnmaiers Buchhandlung [C. Detlof], 1887). 73 Gess, Lehre von der Person Christi, 207. 74 Gess, Christi Person und Werk, III:352. 75 Gess, Lehre von der Person Christi, 292. 76 Gess, Christi Person und Werk, III:344–345. 77 Ibid., III:353. 78 Ibid., III:448. 79 Ibid., III:358ff. 80 Ibid., III:409. 81 Ibid., III:367. 82 Ibid., III:368ff. 83 Georg Ludwig Hahn, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1854). 84 Friedrich Reiff, Die christliche Glaubenslehre als Grundlage der christlichen Weltanschuung. Ein Versuch, 2 vols. (Basel: Bahnmeier, 1873). 85 Augustin Grétillat, Exposé de théologie systématique, vols. III–IV (Paris: Attinger Frères, 1888–1890). 86 Frédéric Godet, Commentaire sur L’Évangile de Saint Jean, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Neuchâtel, 1876–1877); and Frédéric Godet, Études bibliques, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Neuchâtel, 1876). 87 F. H. R. Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit, 2 vols. (Erlangen: Andreas Deichert, 1 1878–1880, 21885–1886), II:99. 88 Frank, System der christlichen Gewissheit, 2 vols. (Erlangen: Andreas Deichert, 1 1870–1873, 21881–1884); and ET: System of the Christian Certainty, trans. from 2nd ed. Maurice J. Evans (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1886).

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118

277

Frank, System der christlichen Gewissheit, I:432–433. Ibid., I:401, 408–409; and Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit, I:152, I:188–189. Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit, II:97–98. Ibid., I:350, cf. I:234–235. Ibid., I:433–434, II:96–97. Ibid., I:348–349; and Frank, System der christlichen Gewissheit, I:434–435. Ibid., II:143. Ibid., II:144; cf. II:101–102, II:104, II:121, II:134. Ibid., II:121–122. Ibid., II:123, II:127, cf. II:99. Ibid., II:150. Ibid., II:147. Frank, Die Theologie der Concordienformel, historisch-dogamtisch entwickelt und beleuchtet, vols. I–IV (Erlangen: Bläsing, 1858–1865), III:268; and Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit, I:233ff, I:299, I:323ff; II:94–95, II:144–145. Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit, I:299; and Frank, System der christlichen Gewissheit, I:412. K. F. A. Kahnis, Die Lehre vom heiligen Geiste (Halle: Schmidt, 1847), 58. K. F. A. Kahnis, Die lutherische Dogmatik, historisch-genetisch dargestellt, 3 vols. (2nd ed., 2 vols.) (Leipzig: Dörffling and Franke, 11861–1868, 21875), III:228; K. F. A. Kahnis, Christentum und Lutherthum (Leipzig: Dörffling and Franke, 1871), VII:243, VII:250; and K. F. A. Kahnis, Der innere Gang des deutschen Protestantismus seit Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Dörffling and Franke, 21860), 34ff. Kahnis justifies this claim on the basis of 1 Corinthians 15:24–28. See Kahnis, Die lutherische Dogmatik I:457; III:214. Kahnis, Die lutherische Dogmatik, I:404, I:455ff, I:464, III:208, III:213–214, III:227; and Kahnis, Christentum, VII–VIII, 242–243, 249. Kahnis, Dogmatik, III:314, III:333–334. Kahnis, Dogmatik, II:596–597; III:182–183; and Kahnis, Christentum, 240, 267. Kahnis, Dogmatik, II:601; III:315, III:345; and Kahnis, Christentum, 267–268. Kahnis, Dogmatik, II:601; III:345; and Kahnis, Christentum, VII, 268. Kahnis, Dogmatik, III:332. C. E. Luthardt, Das johanneische Evangelium nach seiner Eigenthümlichkeit geschildert und erklärt, 2 vols. (Nuremberg: Conrad Geiger, 1852–1853), I:291. C. E. Luthardt, Kompendium der Dogmatik, 9th ed. (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1893), 206, 210; C. E. Luthardt, Apologetische Vorträge über die Heilswahrheiten des Christenthums, im Winter 1867 zu Leipzig gehalten, 7th ed. (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1901), 94, 285; and C. E. Luthardt, Die christliche Glaubenslehre, gemeinverständlich dargestellt (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1898), 365ff. Luthardt, Apologetische Vorträge, 285; and Luthardt, Die christliche Glaubenslehre, 366–367. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, II:205. Alexander von Oettingen, Lutherische Dogmatik, vols. I–II/2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1897–1902), II/2:15–16, II/2:78ff. Oettingen, Lutherische Dogmatik, II/2:105, II/2:132. Ibid., II/2:35, II/2:47, II/2:49, II/2:85, II/2:127; 55, 107, 110, 132. Ibid., II/2:109.

278

DAVID R. LAW

119 F. K. L. Steinmeyer, Apologetische Beiträge, 4 vols. (Berlin: Wiegandt & Grieben, 1866–1873), vol. 4. 120 A. F. C. Vilmar, Dogmatik, Akademische Vorlesungen, 2 vols., ed. K. W. Piderit (Gütersloh, Bertelsmann: 1874). 121 Adolf von Stählin, “Thomasius,” s.v. in Realencyklopädie, 3rd ed., vol. 19 (1911), 742. 122 See, for example, R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality (London: John Murray, 1901); William Sanday, Personality in Christ and in Ourselves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911); and William Temple, Nature of Personality (London: Macmillan, 1911). 123 Robert William Mackay, The Tübingen School and Its Antecedents: A Review of the History and Present Condition of Modern Theology (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863). 124 Isaak Dorner, History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, trans. William Lindsay Alexander and D. W. Simon (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1861– 1863). 125 Alex. B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ in Its Physical Ethical, and Official Aspects (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1876). 126 Frédéric Godet, Commentaire sur L’Évangile de Saint Jean, 2 vols. (Paris: Attinger Frères, 1864–1865); and ET: Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1876–1877, 1880). 127 Charles Gore, “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration,” in Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1890), 313–362, 359–360. 128 Gore, “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration,” 360. 129 C. J. Ellicott, Christus Comprobator (London: SPCK, 1893). 130 H. C. Powell, The Principle of the Incarnation, with Especial Reference to the Relation between Our Lord’s Divine Omniscience and His Human Consciousness (London: Longmans, Green, 1896), 16–35. 131 Francis J. Hall, The Kenotic Theory Considered with Particular Reference to Its Anglican Forms and Arguments (New York: Longmans, Green, 1898). 132 Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God, Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1891 (London: John Murray, 1891); and Charles Gore, Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1895). 133 See, for example, J. Moorhouse, The Teaching of Christ: Its Conditions, Secret, and Results (London: Macmillan, 1891), 25–49; Arthur James Mason, The Conditions of Our Lord’s Life on Earth (London: Longmans, Green, 1896); and Robert L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation (London: Methuen, 1896). 134 A. M. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894), 476–477. 135 P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909); and H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1912). 136 Frank Weston, The One Christ: An Enquiry into the Manner of the Incarnation (London: Longmans, Green, 11907, 21914), 14. References are to the second edition. 137 Weston, One Christ, 15. 138 Ibid., 16.

KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY

279

139 140 141 142 143

Ibid., 151. Ibid., 194–195. Ibid., 138–139. William Temple, Christus Veritas (London: Macmillan, 1924), 142–143. See, for example, Michael Waldhäuser, Die Kenose und die protestantische Christologie (Mainz: Kirchheim & Co., 1912); and Georg Lorenz Bauer, Die neuere protestantische Kenosislehre (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1917). 144 See, for example, John Polkinghorne (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (London: SPCK, 2001).

Bibliography Bauer, Georg Lorenz. Die neuere protestantische Kenosislehre. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1917. Breidert, Martin. Die kenotische Christologie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1977. Bruce, A. B. The Humiliation of Christ. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1900. Dawe, Donald G. The Form of a Servant: A Historical Analysis of the Kenotic Motif. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963. Evans, C. Stephen (ed.). Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gorodetzky, Nadejda. The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought. London: SPCK, 1938. Günther, Ernst. Die Entwicklung der Lehre von der Person Christi im XIX. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1911. Hall, Francis J. The Kenotic Theory, Considered with Particular Reference to Its Anglican Forms and Arguments. New York: Longmans, Green, 1898. Henry, P. “Kénose,” s.v. in Dictionnaire de la Bible. Supplément. Paris: Libraire Letouzey et Ané, 1957, 5:8–161. Lawton, J. S. Conflict in Christology: A Study of British and American Christology, from 1889–1914. London: SPCK, 1947. Loofs, Friedrich. “Kenosis,” s.v. in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 7, ed. James Hastings. 1908–1927, 680–687. Mackintosh, H. R. The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1913. Polkinghorne, John (ed.). The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis. London: SPCK, 2001. Ramsey, Arthur Michael. From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War 1889–1939. London: Longmans, 1960. Waldhäuser, Michael, Die Kenose und die protestantische Christologie. Mainz: Kirchheim, 1912. Welch, Claude (ed.). God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

CHAPTER 13

Mediating Anglicanism: Maurice, Gore, and Temple Ulrike Link-Wieczorek

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is said to have seen the defense of Christianity as his life’s work, “both as a practical rule for life and politics and as a necessity for metaphysical thought.”1 This program remained valid for the theologians of the final third of the nineteenth century, the so-called Anglican mediating theologians. They stood between a still-developing liberal theology and a high church traditionalism. While the former attempted to adapt the Christian confession to a modern worldview with the aid of an English brand of Hegelian idealism, the latter used strong ritualist interests and orthodox dogmatism to preserve a critical distance from both the contemporary intellectual discourse and the social realities of their day. The mediating theologians sought to bring together these approaches by using creatively the legitimate aspects of each. The nineteenth century posed challenges to theology and the church in Britain, challenges which are still in part relevant today. They had to respond both to the continuing progress of knowledge in the natural sciences and to the search for effective economic structures in a young industrial society. These developments aroused concrete expectations for improvements in standards of living: diseases which had until then been life-threatening suddenly became curable, and products which ameliorated the struggles of everyday life became conceivable. From the beginning, these developments were ambivalent: the establishment of an unmerciful capitalism led to the worsening of the situation of the newly established class of industrial workers, and it became clear that the promise of progress would not be fulfilled for everybody. The deep contrasts inherent to this situation became particularly acute during the period under discussion here, that is, in the final third of the nineteenth century, the time of the “Great Depression” throughout Europe. In this period, England’s National Product was already generated predominantly by its extensive industrial production and the high level of export; by 1910, agriculture would be generating only 8%.2 The rate of growth of the industrial cities with

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

281

their overcrowded housing in apartment blocks with insufficient sanitation was such that by 1910 only a quarter of the population still lived in rural areas. The rapid economic restructuring began increasingly and inevitably to be affected by the world market. The pressures of competition increased; the limits to the disposal of industrial products in the world market became clear; reductions in company profits were experienced. Unemployment grew, which, in a system in which social support was underdeveloped or nonexistent, had consequences which are almost unimaginable for us today. Social changes threatened. The criticism of church and religion of the French Revolution had long since sent children and grandchildren into the world, and it was precisely England’s “Manchester capitalism” which was to become the empirical background to Marxism. In this situation the church found itself increasingly unable to speak with a united voice. However, there were also other, theological, reasons for this. Historical critical exegesis, already influential in continental Europe for decades, now came to England. This brought with it the fear that within Christianity the biblical texts were losing not only their normative power but also, and especially, the certainty of truth. In England this was a particular concern, since the biblical texts tended to be understood from a strongly historical perspective as a record of God’s great actions. As early as 1860, after the publication of the volume Essays and Reviews by seven liberal Anglicans, the recognition that the biblical texts could be regarded as such only in the context of the cultural and linguistic space in which they were written was already being discussed with some disquiet.3 One of the primary tasks of the theology of the final third of the nineteenth century was to find an adequate response to this reaction. In general the British theologians of the nineteenth century were very aware of these problems and approached them not only academically and intellectually but also in a spirit of decided personal social engagement. The term “socialism” should not be understood in opposition to “Christian,” as it must be in most other European cultures of the time. In many church circles, socialism stands rather for originally Christian social ethical consequences and is thus accepted not as secular but as Christian socialism. Coleridge’s defense of Christianity went handin-hand with the establishment of a wide range of Christian social institutions and educational facilities. In the context of theological reflection, this social ethical practice of faith took the form of concentration on a new paradigm: the doctrine of the incarnation. In a conscious appeal to the theology of the Early Church, the confession of the Christ event as the “becoming human” of the divine Logos now became the central theological topos for the development of answers to the newly formulated but old question of how Christians can speak of the presence of God in the world. In response to the developments in natural science, the appeal to the incarnation allowed the assertion that, according to the Christian faith, God’s encouragement of life, his Logos, and his Spirit are present in the midst of all developments within – in the evolution of – nature and culture. The incarnation here becomes

282

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

the paradigm for the specific immanence of the transcendent God of whom the biblical texts speak, which, with the help of a Christianized Platonic philosophy, can also be “thought.” At the same time, however, the “becoming human of God” can function as a constant reminder of the necessity of taking seriously the full ethical implications of his presence in the world as the humbled Christ. In the course of the discussions around historical critical exegesis, the confession of Christ itself becomes the new theme even of intrachurch discussions, as questions begin to be asked about how the knowledge of the historical Jesus might come to be better heard in the traditional confession that the Son of God was “made human.” This question became an important subject of debate once the doctrine of the incarnation had achieved its particular theological relevance for contemporary Christian experiencing of the world. But the question remains the subject of virulent debate in Britain well into the twentieth century.4 It was from this triple impulse of the doctrine of God, social ethics, and Christology that the doctrine of the incarnation became relevant, in particular for the mediating theologians within Anglicanism. This theology reached its first high point in 1889 with the publication of Lux Mundi, a volumes of essays edited by Charles Gore; it reached a second in the thought of the influential ecumenical theologian William Temple (†1944), whose creative period was the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Gore and Temple will be introduced in this chapter as examples of Anglican theologians of mediation, although both had precursors in the theology of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), which will serve as the first example. Maurice’s theology was founded in his belief that all people have a part in the community of God as initiated by the community of Christ, which in its turn draws upon the motif of incarnation. The later mediating theology, influenced by Maurice’s thought, found itself in a theological climate in which a broader, less specific approach to the incarnation was taken; this was particularly influenced by the impact of Hegelian philosophy on liberal theology. To demonstrate the particular role of the incarnation paradigm in the mediating stream of Anglican theology, we begin with a brief introduction to the theological landscape of the late nineteenth century.

Unio and Difference A survey of nineteenth-century British (in the sense of English and Scottish) theology reveals three different types of theology of the incarnation. The mediating type can be placed between two poles, which, on account of their different definitions of the relationship between God and the world, may be referred to as theology of unio, on the one hand, and theology of difference, on the other.5 The “theology of unio” represents the position of the liberal theologians. In this approach incarnation was used to describe God’s action in creation and in history in a general sense. The original patristic understanding of the term was stretched to a broad understanding of incarnation. This was justified by an

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

283

appeal to the doctrine of Logos in the Early Church, which, in accordance with the Prologue to the Gospel of John, made it possible to speak of the Logos as the mediator of creation and thus to extend the “becoming human” to a “becoming creation.” Creation and salvation thus became almost synonymous; through a continuing process of immanent divine action, God is bound up with the world to make an implicit unity. A particularly clear example of this understanding of the incarnation can be found in the “New Theology” of Reginald J. Campbell,6 in which almost every conceivable difference was minimized: human beings and God are “in relationship” because, as a “higher self,” God brings about the realization of that higher self in individual human beings. The experience of evil is based solely in a limitation of subjective perception of the world; there is thus no need for Christology to have a soteriological slant, for this leads only to a false dualism. The “divine person” is realized in Jesus Christ in a way which is potentially possible in every person, or even (given the implied unity of God and human beings) in just the same way as it is actually realized in every other person. The “theology of difference” was made up of two main streams. First, Scottish theology, located more strongly in the Reformed tradition, viewed the incarnation in more strictly Christological terms as the focus of God’s new soteriological action in the event of the cross. The death of the incarnate Christ on the cross leads to God’s cosmic victory over sin and thus to the salvation of the world which had broken from God. This is the primary meaning of the incarnation of the Logos. The incarnational unity of divine and human in Christ is here exclusively the soteriological means by which God saves the world; it is not the aim of the creation per se. This view can be found most clearly in the thought of Peter T. Forsyth.7 For Forsyth, the reality of sin was a serious threat to the omnipotence of God, because sin leads to the destruction of the moral ontology through which everything is preserved. In a somewhat polemical article, Forsyth raised a strong protest against Campbell’s “New Theology.”8 Alongside the soteriological form of the emphasis on the difference between God and the world could be found traditional “orthodox” Anglican theology. It too began with a narrowly defined Christological understanding of incarnation and thus speaks of a specific action of God in addition to God’s action in creation. It is probably fair, albeit somewhat exaggerated, to say that in this understanding, the “event” of the incarnation is the forming of the two natures of Christ. The Tractarian Henry P. Liddon wished to understand the use of the doctrine of the incarnation to describe the divinity of Christ as a metaphysical description of substance (“literal Divinity … in the natural sense”).9 As such he defended this theology uncompromisingly against a modern concept of reality, referring to the historical person of Jesus who must, therefore, be understood to act in divine omnipotence. In the teaching of the church, this should be expressed in the language of another world which characterizes the reality of God. This accounts for the great interest of these theologians in what they saw as the strangeness of the language of the creeds of the early church.10

284

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

Anglican mediating theology can be placed between these two poles. By taking as examples the theologies of Maurice, Gore, and Temple, it will be described here over a period of about eighty years. Initially, this theological approach seems closer to the liberal theology of union rather than differentiating strongly between God and the world. Especially in the “manifesto” of mediating theology, Lux Mundi, the incarnation was closely and explicitly associated with the action of God immanent to creation, which made possible the integration of new scientific theories about the development of life (such as the theory of evolution). The idea that God’s work reaches its climax in Christ, the “new man,” a common theme of unio theology, also resonated in mediating theology. The work of (chiefly) Scandinavian Protestant theologians has emphasized the Hegelian influence on mediating theology.11 But this interpretation overlooks both the facts that the borrowings from unio theology were subordinated to a quite specific function and that there was frequently “interference” between them and elements of the theology of difference. In general one can say that the unio theology brought with it an emphasis on the reality of the creative and salvific presence of God in the world, whereas the legitimacy of difference theology was seen as its recognition of the breakdown of the relationship between God and human beings, a situation which has come about largely on account of human self-centeredness. Mediating theology viewed the atonement not so much as an “automatic” part of the immanent creative work of God, but more as based in a new and particular activity of God in the person of Christ. For that reason, as in the traditional orthodox Anglican theology of difference, these theologians believed that the incarnation as a historical reality must not be relativized; this emphasis is particularly apparent in the thought of Charles Gore. The theology of mediation thus effectively used two concepts of incarnation: a broader one which was related to the creative presence of God, and a more narrowly defined understanding of the specific, salvific presence of God in Jesus Christ in which God could be said to achieve unity with himself. This theology developed an implicitly Trinitarian differentiation in its language about God. In this way it prepared the way for the developments of the twentieth century which sought to do justice to the legitimate contribution of both unio and difference theology in a differentiated Trinitarian doctrine of God. These tendencies will be found in the individual portraits that follow.

Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) F. D. Maurice was born the son of a Unitarian pastor in 1805. Even during his youth, his mother and his sisters took a skeptical attitude toward Maurice senior’s denomination. The son, however, remained Unitarian and as a student found himself unable to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Since this was at that time a prerequisite for the taking of a degree at the University of Cambridge, he left the university without graduating. He supported himself for several years by writing, being strongly influenced by Coleridge.

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

285

After converting and joining the Anglican Church, he studied theology at Oxford and was ordained in 1834. Thereafter he was for ten years chaplain to Guy’s Hospital in London, a time during which the death of several members of his close family brought him great pain. In 1840 he was elected Professor of English Literature and History at King’s College, London, and in 1846 he was appointed Professor of Theology at the college’s new Theological School. By 1853 his criticism of the theory of eternal punishment, regarded as overly heterodox, had led to his dismissal from this post. A further ground for his dismissal may have been his role as one of the initiators of the Christian Socialist Movement (1848–1854). After the collapse of the Movement, Maurice became involved in Christian adult education, and in 1854 he founded the Working Men’s College in London. In 1866 he was appointed to the Professorship of Moral Philosophy in Cambridge, where he remained until his death in 1872. Maurice’s theology was shaped by an individual, unorthodox creativity.12 On the one hand, he appears very “modern” in his opposition to a soteriology centered on the punishment of sin; on the other hand, he had no interest at all in historical critical exegesis, understanding the biblical texts directly as records of historical events of divine activity.13 On the one hand, he was engaged throughout his life in seeking to bring about a social and political improvement of the situation of workers and of women;14 on the other hand, he was opposed to structural political change. On the one hand, he worked in support of the growth of Christian Socialism; on the other, he was deeply distrustful of democratic structures and believed with Thomas of Aquinas that the form of state most appropriate to the divine was a monarchy. Ultimately he did not believe in the necessity of changing the world, but that it was necessary to discover the moral structures implicit in the world.15 To argue this, Maurice drew explicitly on the doctrine of the incarnation, which to him as a former Unitarian opened up quite new aspects of the doctrine of God. The creation is fulfilled in the unity of divine and human in Jesus Christ; in Christ humanity can achieve its true purpose, which is community with God (Kingship of Christ, 1832). The incarnation of Christ shows us every human being as part of a God-human-unity in the at-one-ment, and so religious education should also lead to encouragement to social transformation at least in their individual lives.16 True community of Christ (which Maurice believed could be realized only within the church) is more than simply the fulfilling of a spiritual longing for God. Even before the beginning of the world, community structures are established within God’s eternity; these become world-reality through the creative mediation of the Logos. With the coming of Christ, it becomes possible for these structures to be realized also in the community of the faithful. In order to be able to affirm that the world will find its true identity in community structures borne by God, Maurice complemented the Unitarian theology learned from his father with the doctrine of the Trinity. Through his emphasis of the social dimension of the Trinity, “community” became a central concept both in his theology of the atonement and in his practical social and ethical commitment.

286

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

For Maurice, community implied an anti-individualistic approach; it was also inextricably linked to the idea that an attitude of self-sacrifice is God’s will. In opposition to the understandings of atonement which depended on theories of satisfaction with which Maurice found himself surrounded, he developed an understanding of atonement in which God conquered sin by entering into a relationship with sinners and thereby also into the experience of self-giving – we might today say, to the extent that God was in danger of losing his identity. This is what takes place in Christ’s Passion, although that is only the “external” aspect of the Son’s eternal giving of himself which has in fact been going on since before the beginning of the world. Without this Trinitarian perspective, one would have to see God as losing himself in his self-sacrifice. Maurice, however, wanted to speak of a form of self-giving which fulfills identity and to understand it as the fundamental moral structure of the world as created by God. The incarnation reveals and makes explicit a structure which until then had been implicit; the structure is not first “acquired” in the death of Jesus. For this reason, it is possible – and desirable – for the faithful to achieve true knowledge of God through Christ. Maurice is almost stubborn in his refusal to give any credence to the apophatic influences on Mansel’s doctrine of revelation in his discussions with that intellectually highly skilled philosopher of religion. As part of his commitment to the realization of the true community of Christ, Maurice became a founder of and motive force (admittedly in the sense of a spiritual leader)17 in the Christian Socialist Movement (CSM), which was active from 1848 until 1854. The political and organizational responsibility lay in the hands of Maurice’s younger friend John Malcolm Ludlow (1821–1911), supported journalistically by Charles Kingsley (1819–1875). Both agreed with Maurice that socialism was only possible as Christian socialism, because they saw the focus on Christ as having a self-critical, anti-ideological potential. For them competition, the buzzword of developing capitalism, led only to a distortion of a focus on Christ. The CSM sought to set a concrete counter to this by emphasizing fellowship and cooperation and by establishing producers’ associations. The first of these was the Tailor’s Association, with which the CSM sought to set a counterbalance to exploitation within the textile industry. Independent producers and workers amalgamated to enable them to promote and sell their work; they shared profits and sought to protect themselves against the wild speculations of many industrialists. The influence of the CSM’s political work contributed eventually to the passing of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act in 1852 for the protection of cooperative societies. To the Labour Party, which had been established at around the same time, no connection was sought. The main focus of the CSM’s work was education. Together with other members of the movement, workers in the cooperatives and interested church members were expected to attend classes led by experts in order to learn the principles of economics and their social consequences and to be instructed in the ethical countervision of a truly Christian society. But because Maurice’s theological thought was primarily concerned to discover the

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

287

fundamental structure of reality as founded in the community of Christ rather than to construct this structure through social change, it would probably be true to say that the educational aspect was too highly weighted in the CSM. Maurice remained conservative in his social ideas. The CSM existed for only six years; after it folded, Maurice turned his attention exclusively to education and in 1854 he founded the Working Men’s College in London. His idea of a “society of differences” was expressed in the class-specific didactic principles of his theory of education.18 The CSM was ultimately unable to overcome the distrust of the workers who generally found neither the educational focus nor the moral requirements of the Christian Socialist cooperatives acceptable. The movement was carried largely by members of the middle and upper classes, a tendency which could also later be observed in the social and ethical commitment of the Lux Mundi group. Nevertheless, in the CSM a relationship between the Anglican Church and working-class communities had been established and would be continued in the social and ethical focus of later groups and organizations, for instance of the slum priests in Bethnal Green and of the Guild of St. Matthew, which grew out of their work.

The Publication of Lux Mundi (1889) In 1889, a group of young high-church theologians from Oxford published their theological reactions to the challenges of their age in a collection of essays entitled Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation.19 This volume places the doctrine of incarnation firmly at the center of Anglican mediating theology. The eleven contributors, all young priests or lecturers from Oxford, had been meeting regularly for some years for theological discussion and shared prayer. Not without some irony, they named themselves the Holy Party. Their theology was close to that of the Oxford Movement, but in contrast to the Tractarians, they were convinced that the Anglican Church needed to seek a new theological expression of the great Christian themes. Above all, they were concerned to enable the theological integration of the theory of evolution, and this they sought to do by their use of a broad understanding of the paradigm of incarnation to denote God’s creative presence in the world. In this way they propagated “Incarnation as the basis of dogma” (as the title of the essay by R. C. Moberly put it), applying this doctrine to all areas of the church’s life and teaching: to the doctrine of God, the theology of history, the doctrine of the atonement, sacraments, ecclesiology, politics, and ethics. The understanding of theology of the incarnation which permeated the volume was developed in the essay by John Illingworth, “Incarnation and Development.” It was rooted in the conviction that, according to patristic teaching, the work of the eternal Logos in the world reached its high point when the Logos was made human; this is also a high point of the work of creation and thus not simply a consequence of sin.

288

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

This is compatible with scientific knowledge in relation to the theory of evolution: “Now in scientific language, the Incarnation may be said to have introduced a new species into the world – a Divine man transcending past humanity, as transcended the rest of the animal creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent generations of men” (151–152). Following this argument, the cross was understood as the culmination of the moral ontology of self-sacrifice, the true fulfillment of life. As in Maurice’s thought, the atonement was seen less in terms of representative sacrifice, or even punishment, and instead as patiently borne suffering, that is, as self-sacrifice. In the words of the author of the essay on atonement, Arthur Lyttleton, The cross was, on the one hand, the proclamation of God’s ordinance against sin, on the other it was the response of man at length acknowledging the righteousness of the condemnation…. He must pass through this last and most awful human experience … because by the victorious endurance of it alone could the propitiation be accomplished…. If this is mysterious, irrational, transcendental, so is all morality; for at the root of all morality lies the power of self-sacrifice, which is nothing but the impulse of love to make a vicarious offering for its fellows, and the virtue of such an offering to restore and to quicken.20

In the light of the experience of the First World War, this approach became a central interpretative tool within Anglican theology and the Church. For the British nation, the war meant following the exemplum Christi by offering a socially oriented, nonindividualistic self-sacrifice for the good of a general improvement in the living standards of all citizens.21 It could be said that from that time, up to and including the beginning of the Second World War, Anglican theology sought to understand suffering as a necessary phase in the development of progress. William Temple in 1939 was the first to sow the seeds of doubt about whether the corporate self-sacrifice of a nation was really capable of bringing about such a transformation, or, indeed, whether the effecting of this transformation lay within human power at all. Lux Mundi attracted particular attention for the essay by its editor, Charles Gore, who was later to become one of the most influential theologians of the Anglican Church. Under the title “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration,” he took leave of the traditional view of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. With this article, Gore opened the door for the acceptance of historical critical exegesis within Anglican theology. His thesis, that the biblical writings should be understood as a record of the work of the Spirit, whose shaping power grew gradually until it found its climax in Christ, allowed the Bible, and particularly the texts of the Old Testament, to be perceived as having been shaped by a process of literary formation. This did not stop the authors of Lux Mundi from continuing to regard the writings of the New Testament as historical reports of the life, death, and resurrection of the “God Incarnate.” This too could be founded in the doctrine of incarnation. Charles Gore pointed to the

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

289

hymn of Philippians and its language of kenosis, which he chose to see as the motif of a metaphysical understanding of the self-emptying of God. These were in turn intended to explain how God could enter into history and be present in the full humanity of Jesus. Gore subsequently developed these ideas in his Bampton Lectures on “The Incarnation of the Son of God” (1891) and in the volume Dissertations (1895). It could well be claimed that even today the kenosis motif forms one of the central elements of Anglican theology. Most important for Gore was the fact that the use of this motif allowed him to affirm that the incarnate God did not have to be imagined to be allknowing in his historical existence. This theory drew bitter opposition from the Tractarian Henry P. Liddon, who became the spokesman of the rejection of Lux Mundi by Tractarian orthodoxy.

Charles Gore (1853–1932) Charles Gore was “by birth and temperament” a British aristocrat.22 Although he himself never belonged to the Oxford Movement, in 1884 he was nonetheless appointed first Principal of Pusey House in Oxford, a foundation which was intended to carry forward the tradition of that Movement in research, teaching, and service in the church. During the short time that Gore served as a village priest, he founded an Anglican male religious community, the Community of the Resurrection, which still exists today. He remained a member of the Community until his death. In 1894 Gore was appointed Canon of Westminster Cathedral, and from 1898 until 1919 he held a number of bishoprics, the longest of which (1911–1919) was the See of Oxford. He eventually resigned in order to dedicate himself to research and preaching, and to take a long trip to India. Charles Gore’s character was formed by a strict asceticism which was combined with a passionate concern for social and political questions. He was active in the Christian Social Union from its founding in the publication year of Lux Mundi, 1889. His primary interest was the education of workers; from this perspective he frequently and severely criticized the established church for its orientation toward the middle class and the guarding of its own economic interests.23 Gore’s influence upon the Anglican Church cannot be highly enough estimated. However, this was not entirely unproblematic, for Gore’s work was shaped by a deep ambivalence. Its two poles were characterized by, on the one hand, Lux Mundi, and on the other by his defense of orthodoxy while he was a bishop. As the editor of Lux Mundi, he stood for the opening of Anglican theology to modern science and exegesis; as bishop he was involved in relentless controversies with liberal theologians, the so-called modernists, which led to their restriction through disciplinary procedures, of which the removal of licenses to preach was one of his more lenient measures.24 The bitter struggle was waged against priests and university theologians of his own and other dioceses; his distrust was earned by

290

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

modernist, symbolic interpretations of the virgin birth, resurrection, and empty tomb, which seemed to Gore to contradict traditional, literal understandings. Gore’s concern in these controversies was to preserve the Christian doctrine of God, according to which God is to be seen not only as a general condition for the existence of all that is real, but also as having independent existence and coming from elsewhere, and intervening in the course of the world through particular historical actions. For this creed Gore is dependent on an understanding of language which allows the actual event of the incarnation to be made manifest through its “symptoms” as a historical fact in the consciousness of the speaker. Gore had a feeling for symbolic language, but wanted to limit its use to the description of a “group of subjects which lie at present outside possible human experience – the beginnings of the world, the end of the world, heaven and hell and the state of the dead.”25 He was thus concerned to emphasize that this is exactly not the kind of language which is being used when referring to the incarnation; the modernists, with their broader concept of incarnation, saw this otherwise. Gore insisted that the events which accompanied the incarnation must be expressed in a statement “which professes to be a statement of what has actually happened.”26 However, he also knew that when discussing, for instance, the virgin birth it is a question of finding “the best expression in human language of something which human language cannot properly express.”27 He thus understood the miraculous events of Jesus’ birth and resurrection as essential aspects of the incarnation, the significance of which lay in their function.28 He wanted to view them not as the marks of a substantial divinity of Jesus, but as side effects of the breaking through of the presence of God. Once again, the emphasis lay on the knowledge of God in the faithful. This knowledge is shaped by the miracles associated with the incarnation, which have a primarily prophetic effect. This argument, which seeks to differentiate between an event per se and an event as the function of an event, was an attempt, shaped by idealist philosophy, to understand and preserve classical dogma in the perspective of the modern age. In his struggle against modernism, Gore defended his mediating theology by use of more or less convincing arguments. He did this by attempting to prevent the theology of the incarnation from drifting into broader unio concepts of theology by interpreting the work of God in Christ as new, particular, and thus historically fixable. To do this he relied on the theoretical arguments of idealist philosophy about the nature of science and knowledge; on elements of a theology of difference which are reminiscent of the “strange language of divine reality” of the most severe critic of Lux Mundi, Henry P. Liddon; and, not least, on the simple application of the authority of his office. Gore saw an important connection between the theology of incarnation and the prophetic tradition of Christianity which helps to explain his intense social interest. Like the other Lux Mundi theologians, he did not allow his eye for reality to be broken by a skepticism rooted in the theology of the crucifixion. Instead he held to his fundamental belief in a creation which is directed toward the

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

291

realizing of God’s good order, an aim which is furthered by the broad incarnational presence of God.29 But at the same time Gore had a pragmatic and realistic concept of sin which, in contrast to other mediating theologians, tended to act as a brake to optimism about progress and to shift his focus more strongly toward a future eschatology. He was always opposed to a too-rapid identification of the order of nature and the revelation of Christ. For this reason also, a necessary element of Gore’s theology was, and remained, the assumption that God intervenes in the world through the incarnation in the narrow sense. He believed that only in this way could effective knowledge of God and self be provoked; such knowledge he understood to be the realization of a true partaking in the community of Christ which then resulted in a shared responsibility for the shaping of the world. Like the other Lux Mundi authors, however, Gore found the basic motifs for his social and ethical commitment in the broader definition of incarnation. This taught that the Logos is present not only in the processes of nature, such as those described in the theory of evolution, but also in political and social developments.30 For this reason it was important to the Lux Mundi authors that they should understand and use the ideas developed in this context. In contrast to Maurice, they found in this conviction the basis for viewing the development of democracy as the result of a divinely inspired present. Like socialist ideas, democratic structures encourage the further development of human nature through an emphasis on brotherhood and nonindividualism. However, here too Gore showed the break in the broader perspective of incarnation through the narrower, Christ-focused understanding which is characteristic of his theology. Not everything that is thought under divine inspiration and put into political practice is already perfect. All concepts that stand in the process of cultural development must be critically illuminated by the light of the historical Christ: “[He] is the true liberator, the true emancipator of man, because he laid the foundation of human liberty so deep in the redemption of the individual from personal sin and selfishness.”31 As part of this critical focus, Gore warned of the dangers both of an undifferentiated democratic system which is too responsive to an unfiltered vox populi,32 and of socialism in the form of state socialism. For him, as for the other mediating theologians, socialism was acceptable primarily as a general moral approach to the relationship between the individual and society. He rejected socialism as an economic theory (under which he included materialism and theories of dependence) and continued to plead for the independence of the church from all political organizations. This in no way implied that the church should restrict itself to the mediation of God’s presence through the sacraments. Instead, Gore understood the church as a living community which finds the roots of its existence in a particularly deep and intimate relationship with the ascended Christ without seeking to be understood as the unfalsified image of Christ. He liked to use the Anglican idiom of the church as an “extension of the incarnation,” although he never really worked out a theory of how to deal with the tension between identity and nonidentity which is integral to this idiom. The ideological independence of the church from political

292

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

organizations, so important to him, certainly offers some kind of analogy to the relationship between the broader and narrower understandings of the incarnation. In the context of its critical view of the world, the church is entrusted with the particular task of committing itself to the development of a social community both within and without the church. This should be a community which offers all people opportunities for a “good life” in fulfillment of an expectation that Christ’s historical life showed to be a real possibility. Gore’s social and political awareness and his commitment to the Christian socialism of his age were fed by these ideas. He supported campaigns for the regulation of wages for workers in industry, calls for educational reforms, and initiatives for women’s franchise. Gore was active in the Christian Social Union (CSU) from its beginnings.33 The CSU was founded in 1889, the year of the dock strikes, by Gore’s Lux Mundi friend Henry Scott Holland. The focus of its work was academic, scientific, and theological study, although, like Maurice’s CSM, the CSU was intended to promote the development of concepts which would lead to the improvement of the hopeless situation of industrial workers. The CSU’s flyers named as its three main aims:34 1. “To claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice.” 2. “To study in common how to apply the moral truths and principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties of the present day.” 3. “To present Christ in practical life as the Living Master and King, the Enemy of wrong and selfishness, the Power of righteousness and love.” The CSU’s discussions should not be imagined as being entirely theoretical and distanced from the concrete social problems of their day. Themes such as sweated labor, lead poisoning, dangerous trades, speculation, and overproduction show that the Union was concerned about the economic reality of a laissez-faire capitalism.35 The CSU even collated a “white list” of firms which paid the wages negotiated by the unions. In the London County Council elections of 1892, the influence of the CSU was able to achieve the statement of concrete aims such as “sanitary dwellings, pure and cheap water, and fairer taxation.”36 A study of the economic and moral implications of private ownership concluded that it was not an absolute right. Private property is acceptable only for as long as it can be recognized as a medium toward achieving a good life for all people. The study regretted that in the course of history, a relative right had come to be regarded as absolute.37 As in Maurice’s time, the system of unrestrained and unscrupulous competition was seen as responsible for the development of intolerable social conditions. The CSU raised questions (not unlike those of the late twentieth century) about whether the clearly immoral law of the market was necessarily “autonomous,” that is, unresponsive to any external influence. And ultimately it was the broad theology of the incarnation, with its confidence that God’s work

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

293

cannot result in immoral effects, that inspired the demand for economic theories which included ethical considerations from the beginning and not just as an afterthought.38 Even the idea of state intervention was considered and not immediately rejected on principle (at least not by Scott Holland, who here took a different line from the more skeptical Gore). Nevertheless, the CSU did not develop a real social theory of Christian economics, nor did it achieve coordinated political action. One possible reason for this is the broad appeal to the community of Christ as the true source of all social peace; this did not lend itself to a concrete manifestation in a vision of social structures. Allan Suggate describes the speeches made by the president of the CSU, Bishop Bruce Westcott, as “filled with opaque rhetorical antitheses, such as socialism and individualism, which were morally uplifting at the price of contact with the real world of politics and economics.”39 Like Gore, Westcott was meticulous in his attempts to keep the CSU from being identified with any political party – for instance, the Labour Party – or with any particular social class. In this the CSU chose to take a different route from that of twentieth-century liberation theologians. For the latter, the wish to realize their option for the poor led them to seek concrete structures and to identify with specific political movements. Instead, Gore wanted to concentrate on the question of how the church – as distinct from secular, plural culture – could be offered as the only true “Way.” Besides his support for the CSU’s economic study programs, Gore had a particular interest throughout his life for education among the workers. Here too there is a parallel to Maurice. Gore saw education as an absolutely necessary asset which the workers needed if they were to succeed in implementing their demands for social justice and to retain the advantages they had achieved. In his fundamental trust of God’s reasonable work in the world, Gore, like all the mediating theologians, could not doubt the high value of education for human selfrealization. This led to his long years of work in the Worker’s Educational Association (WEA), founded in 1903. Gore shared this commitment to workers’ education not only with the older Maurice, but also with the youngest of the three Anglican mediating theologians discussed here, William Temple.

William Temple (1881–1944) In total the older Gore and the still young William Temple were to work together in the WEA for two decades. Temple became a member in 1905 and was president of the Association from 1908 to 1924. His thought is shaped by a deep sense of the need for political and social reform and the necessity of broadening the scope of public education to include the working classes. For him, as for Maurice and for Gore, this social awareness is closely linked to a theology of the incarnation which views the church as entrusted with a particular moral responsibility for the realization of the community of Christ. From the beginning of his public work, Temple was engaged in unceasing activity in which he sought

294

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

possibilities of expressing a Christian commitment also in secular institutions. Temple greeted the Labour Party enthusiastically as a society which also manifested the Pauline ideal of brotherhood (in 1908, in The Church and the Labour Party). He joined the party in 1918, but subsequently resigned in 1921 when he was appointed bishop. He is said to have often felt himself to be in a more Christian environment in the Workers’ Education Association than in the church. Because Temple saw in the unity between church and state a chance for the church, he was less opposed to that unity than was Gore. Nevertheless he worked for many years for the Life and Liberty Movement, which campaigned for the Church of England to have more legal autonomy from the state. In 1917 he resigned as Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, giving up two-thirds of his salary, in order to dedicate himself to this cause. Without Temple’s commitment and work, the Education Act of 1944 would never have been passed. The act embodied an agreement between representatives of the state and from different denominations to the introduction of a structure of education which included interdenominational religious education and school prayers and assemblies. Although Temple valued the ecclesiastical establishment highly, he also argued in many books for the involvement of laypeople in decision-making processes and for the need for Christian socialist commitment in the church as a whole. In 1926 he attempted (unasked) to mediate in the General Strike, but failed. To the end of his life, social questions remained an important concern. In 1938, already nine years Archbishop of York, he initiated a nationwide study of the effects of mass unemployment (Men without Work) which was subsequently very well received. The main difference between Gore and Temple was the latter’s greater openness to liberal interpretations of the articles of faith. Until his death he continued to call for more freedom of opinion in theological controversy to be allowed within the church. Ultimately it was this interest which led Temple to become one of the founders of the ecumenical movement; the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948 was in large measure due to his work, although he did not live to see it. His influence therefore extended far beyond the Church of England.40 William Temple was the son of Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1897 until 1902. Following in his father’s footsteps, he became Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of the Anglican Communion in 1942. In him the Anglican theology of incarnation became one of the driving forces of the beginnings of the ecumenical movement. Temple’s life included the experience of two world wars and the period of transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, which toward the end of his life he saw as decisive. It should, however, be noted that, on taking his degree in 1906, Temple was not immediately ordained. He had expressed doubts about the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Christ. It is thus clear that Temple came from a rather different stable than Gore with his struggle against liberal theology. It was not until the appointment of the new Archbishop, Randall Davidson, who frequently exercised a restraining influence on Gore, that Temple was ordained, in 1909.

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

295

Temple himself soon overcame his own worries about a nonsymbolic understanding of New Testament miracle stories, and in particular about those connected with the incarnation.41 His gift for the reconciliation or harmonizing of different positions can already be seen at this stage; it was to make him almost irreplaceable in the ecumenical movement when it came to restarting stalled processes and dialogues. Ultimately this gift lives from a strong belief and trust in the fundamental unity of a world which is supported by the immanence of God, a belief which is itself rooted in Temple’s theology of the incarnation. It makes Temple one of the last representatives of Anglican mediating theology who, with unbroken optimism, places his trust in divine order and natural law and shows no sign of the skepticism that can also be found in Gore’s thought.42 Michael Ramsey has described the different religious mentalities of Gore and Temple: “Gore, ever wearing the scars of doubt and conflict as to the love of God, but sure that the orthodox Creed with its miracles was the only one which made God and His love credible; Temple, serene in his faith in Christ, but searching long as to whether the orthodox understanding of that faith were the true one.”43 As a young man, Temple had offered a strong criticism of the metaphysics of substance, which he wanted to replace by a consciously psychological, but at the same time metaphysical, terminology of will.44 This more strictly Christological conception still appeared in his main theological work, Christus Veritas, published in 1924.45 Here, however, it is anchored in the discussion of the Godhead of Jesus Christ, which is now prepared to read the biblical texts through the eyes of the Christological and Trinitarian statements of the early church, that is, “the Church’s account of him.”46 Temple’s focus has expanded: he is no longer particularly interested in the development of a Christological conception which makes it possible to think of the individual historicity of Jesus, which was Gore’s motive for developing the theory of kenosis. Instead, Temple is now concerned with the consequences of incarnational Christology for the doctrine of God, an interest which is not found in Gore’s work at all. At the center of Temple’s religious philosophical circlings of the orthodox creed stands the idea of an “enrichment of God” through the experience of the incarnation, not only of a particular historical human being, but also of universal humanity. With the aid of Hegelian and personal idealism, Temple attempts to take the idea of the historically particular existence of the universal and make it thinkable. As it is also for Gore, the aim of his search for a new way of thinking is to make clear that the event of the incarnation is an event of revelation which by bringing new knowledge of God allows the unfolding of a power which has the potential to change reality. In Christ, the God incarnate, God reveals himself specifically in a closeness which seeks relationship – by which Temple means also enrichment – or which strives for unity. The sovereignty of God can to this extent be understood as flexible, for God is “continually adjusting his rules for the welfare of his constituents.”47 Temple does not mean this to imply a total change in God. In clarification of this point, he draws on numerous philosophical and theological ideas, including the

296

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

direct derivation of the incarnation from the immanent, “eternal” Trinity. This is the context of the statement which later would often be cited by John Hick and Don Cupitt as an example of a classical, mythologizing, incarnational Christology: “He who lived among men and died on the Cross was the Second Person of the Eternal Trinity.”48 Ultimately, however, Temple saw both formulations of ecclesiastical dogma and the help he found in philosophical ideas primarily as analogical linguistic attempts to understand the actual historical event of the experience of God in Christ which is witnessed by the biblical texts: “The experience comes first, the formulation comes later” (112). This insight teaches him to value as statements of fact both the creeds of the early church and Gore’s fight to retain the miracles of the incarnation. But it also makes Temple more able than Gore to embark on the search for other concepts in a language which is less familiar to the church. It is in just such a searching, creative way that Temple combines an almost indefensibly broad theology of incarnation, which speaks of God’s work in the order and the reasonableness of creation and also in history, with the narrower understanding which sees God’s new way of coming into the world in the human experience of Christ. This experience includes – but is not only – the human experience of suffering on the cross which is experienced by God in Christ, and which, being endured, is overcome. Temple sees this suffering as the universal suffering of humankind. Like liberal theology, Temple is sympathetic toward the idea that suffering should in general be functionalized as the servant of good. He comes dangerously close to equating the experience of suffering by God with the overcoming of suffering. Toward the end of his life, Temple himself suffered an extremely painful form of gout with great self-discipline and without losing his fundamental optimism.49 Does his theology represent the theological absolutization of a particular culture of dealing with suffering? David Nicholls points to the naïveté which led Temple to believe that as a consequence of their self-sacrifice, ecclesiastical leaders “should contribute to a solution by urging ‘the spiritual method of conciliation’ and by admonishing the parties in a conflict to return to proposals made by royal commissions and other supposedly impartial bodies.”50 Above all, it can be asked whether Temple’s soteriology, which, despite its patripassian aspects, is almost triumphalist in its proclamation of the overcoming of suffering and its conviction that Christians must play a responsible role in political conflicts of all kinds, really offers an adequate preparation for the catastrophes of the twentieth century. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Temple himself began to suspect that it did not. His now-famous call for a new approach to theology at what is in many ways the cultural threshold of the twentieth century expressed his own doubts about his faith in divine order: We cannot come to the men of today saying, “You will find that all your experience fits together in a harmonious system if you will only look at it in the illumination of the Gospel” … our task with this world is not to explain it but to convert it. Its need

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

297

can be met, not by the discovery of its own immanent principle in signal manifestation through Jesus Christ, but only by the shattering impact upon its self-sufficiency and arrogance of the Son of God, crucified, risen and ascended, pouring forth that explosive and disruptive energy which is the Holy Ghost.51

Acknowledgment

Translation by Dr. Charlotte Methuen.

Notes 1 E. K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bibliographical Study (Oxford: 1938), 310. 2 See The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 6, part 1 (Cambridge, 1965), 60ff.; M. G. Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics, 4th ed. (London, 1909), 615; and David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901–1914 (Houndsmills, UK: MacMillan, 1996). 3 Frederick Temple et al., Essays and Reviews (London, 1860). 4 See, for instance, John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate (London, 1993). Compare also Ulrike Link-Wieczorek, Inkarnation oder Inspiration? Christologische Grundfragen in der Diskussion mit britischer anglikanischer Theologie (Göttingen: Buchhandel, 1998), 200–235, 334–349. 5 For the following typology and examples, see Link-Wieczorek, Inkarnation oder Inspiration? 39–109, and the literature referred to there. See also David Nicholls, “Two Tendencies in Anglo-Catholic Political Theology,” in Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers, ed. Geoffrey Rowell (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), 140–152. 6 R. J. Campbell, The New Theology (New York, 1907). 7 See, for instance, P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ (London, 1910; reprint, London, 1965). 8 P. T. Forsyth, “Immanence and Incarnation,” in The Old Faith and the New Theology, ed. C. H. Vine (London, 1907). 9 See Henry P. Liddon, The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (London: 1867; 14th ed., 1890), 193–194. 10 Keith W. Clements, Lovers of Discord: Twentieth Century Theological Controversies in England (London: SPCK, 1988), 17f. 11 See T. Christensen, The Divine Order: A Study of F. D. Maurice’s Theology (Leiden: Brill, 1973); and on Gore, see R. Ekström (1944). 12 For further reading, see David Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); G. C. Binyon, The Christian Socialist Movement in England (London: SPCK, 1931); Carter Heyward and Sue Phillips, eds., No Easy Peace: Liberating Anglicanism: A Collection of Essays in Memory of William John Wolf (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992); Frank McClain et al., F. D. Maurice: A Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1982); J. R. Orens (1981); Bernard M. G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore (London: Longman, 1971); and Maurice Benington Reckitt, The Christian in Politics (1946).

298

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

13 See Ieuan Ellis, “F. D. Maurice: Anticipation of a Synchronic Approach to Scripture?” in Scripture: Meaning and Method: Essays Presented to Antony Tyrell Hanson, ed. Barry P. Thompson (Hull, UK: Hull University Press) 1987, 153–167. 14 Frank McClain, “Maurice on Women,” in McClain et al., F. D. Maurice, 23–57. 15 For a stronger acknowledgment of the “subversive” aspects of Maurice’s thought, see Paul Dafydd Jones, “Jesus Christ and the Transformation of English Society: The ‘Subversive Conservatism’ of Frederick Denison Maurice,” Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 2 (2003): 205–228. 16 Jones, “Jesus Christ,” 206, 214ff., 218, 227–228. 17 For a more skeptical view about the thesis of Maurice’s more or less spiritual leadership, see Jones, “Jesus Christ.” 18 See Michalina Vaughan and Margaret Scotford Archer, “F. D. Maurice and the Educational Role of the National Church,” in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5, ed. Michael Hill (London: SCM Press, 1972), 48–59. 19 Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London, 1889; 14th ed., 1985). See also the two volumes of essays which were compiled to mark the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Lux Mundi, and in which not only possibilities of continuity but also moments of discontinuity in the discussion of the same themes can be seen: R. Morgan (ed.), The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol, UK, 1989); and G. Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London, 1989). 20 A. Lyttleton, “The Atonement,” in Gore, Lux Mundi, 201–229, quotes on 213, 215, and 223, respectively. This selection of quotations is taken from David L. Edwards, Leaders of the Church of England 1828–1944 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 260. 21 See Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SPCK, 1978). On the theme of service of others and its sociological basis in the middle and upper classes, see David Nicholls, Deity and Domination: Images of God and the State in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1989): “It is somehow assumed in all this that Christians are in the superior position of offering service to others rather than needing it themselves” (34). 22 Harold Hubbard, “Charles Gore,” in Church Quarterly Review 155 (1954): 22–34, here 22. For further reading, compare the following: J. Carpenter (1960); Arthur Michael Ramsey, From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War 1889–1939 (London: Longman, 1961); Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore; and Reckitt, The Christian in Politics. 23 See, for instance, Morgan, The Religion of the Incarnation, 210ff. 24 For details of Gore’s controversies with liberal theologians, see G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore: A Great Englishman (London, 1935), 342–351; Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and Conflict (Worthing, UK: Churchman, 1988); Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, 77–91; K. W. Clements, Lovers of Discord, 51ff.; Reginald H. Fuller, “Historical Criticism and the Bible,” in Anglicanism and the Bible, ed. F. H. Borsch (Wilton, 1984) 143–168; and Link-Wieczorek, Inkarnation oder Inspiration? 127–138. 25 Charles Gore, Belief in God (London, 1921), 179. 26 Gore, Belief in God, 181. 27 Ibid., 181.

MEDIATING ANGLICANISM

299

28 For the following points, see ibid., 253–262, 274ff. 29 For this theme, see especially his later work: Charles Gore, The Philosophy of the Good Life, Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St. Andrews, 1929–30 (London, 1930). 30 See Gore, Christ and Society, Halley Stewart Lectures 1927 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928). Compare also Carpenter, 247ff. 31 Charles Gore, Dominant Ideas and Corrective Principles, 111, cited according to Carpenter, 248. 32 Charles Gore, “The Failures of Democracy,” Church Times, May 21, 1920. 33 See Binyon, The Christian Socialist Movement; Alan M. Suggate, William Temple and Christian Social Ethics Today (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1987); Reckitt, The Christian in Politics; and Carpenter. 34 For sources, see Carpenter, 35 n. 52; and compare Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, 348. 35 Reckitt, The Christian in Politics, 145. 36 Suggate, William Temple, 22. 37 Charles Gore and Vernon Bartlet, eds., Property: Its Duties and Rights Historically, Philosophically and Religiously Regarded (London: Macmillan, 1913). 38 Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, 349. 39 Suggate, William Temple, 22. 40 Compare Nicholls, Deity and Domination, 45. 41 Ibid., 45–46. 42 With carefully weighed criticism, A. R. Vidler points to the limitations of Temple’s character, which he sees as being neither “complex” nor skeptical. See A. R. Vidler, “The Limitations of William Temple,” Theology 79 (1976): 36–41. 43 See Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, 147. 44 See William Temple, “The Divinity of Christ,” in Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought: By Seven Oxford Men (London, 1912; reprint, Freeport, N.Y., 1971), 211–263. Compare also Link-Wieczorek, Inkarnation oder Inspiration? 183ff. 45 William Temple, Christus Veritas: An Essay (London: Macmillan, 1924), 150. For further readings about Temple, see Suggate, William Temple; Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, 146–161; and John Kent, William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain, 1880–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 46 Temple, Christus Veritas, 121. 47 Nicholls, Deity and Domination, 48. 48 Temple, Christus Veritas, 121. 49 For Temple’s experience and also other examples of personal experiences of suffering by theologians of the time, see Link-Wieczorek, Inkarnation oder Inspiration? 298ff. 50 Nicholls, Deity and Domination, 49. 51 See William Temple, “Theology To-day,” Theology 39 (1939): 326–333.

Bibliography Avis, Paul. Gore: Construction and Conflict. Worthing, UK: Churchman, 1988. Clements, Keith W. Lovers of Discord: Twentieth Century Theological Controversies in England. London: SPCK, 1988.

300

ULRIKE LINK-WIECZOREK

Kent, John. William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain, 1880–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Link-Wieczorek, Ulrike. Inkarnation oder Inspiration? Christologische Grundfragen in der Diskussion mit britischer anglikanischer Theologie. Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, band 84. Göttingen: Buchhandel, 1998. Nicholls, David. Deity and Domination: Images of God and the State in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1989. Ramsey, Arthur Michael. From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War 1889–1939. London: Longman, 1961. Reardon, Bernard M. G. From Coleridge to Gore. London: Longman, 1971. Rose, J. The Intellectual Life of the Working Classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Suggate, Alan M. William Temple and Christian Social Ethics Today. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1987. Young, David. F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

CHAPTER 14

Mediating Theology in Germany Matthias Gockel

In the first part, I will clarify the concepts of mediation and mediating theology, put them in historical perspective, and highlight central themes and developments. The second part sketches the theology of I. A. Dorner. The conclusion offers trajectories for further study.

Mediation and Mediating Theology First, at the outset, a few semantic distinctions are necessary. “Mediation” as a theological concept is not the same as “mediating theology,” and “mediating theologians” are still another matter. Various assessments of mediating theology and different understandings of mediation are possible. Historically, mediating theology (Vermittlungstheologie) is the name for a theological movement that was inspired, above all, by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Its strength was a wealth of thought and an agility of mind, not the construction of an ingenious theological system. The spectrum of representatives is wide, and a clear-cut list of adherents or supporters does not exist.1 The term itself might have appeared for the first time in 1856 in a rather polemical context,2 but the movement was formed in 1828, as we will see in the next section. Its decline began in the 1870s, when Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) listed it as one of three outcomes of Schleiermacher’s theology, which he himself wanted to overcome.3 Its main contemporaries were revivalist or pietistic theology and confessional theology on the one side, and liberal and speculative theology on the other side.4 Double classification is not unusual. Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck (1799–1877) is called a mediating theologian, although he also counts as a “typical revivalist theologian.”5 Richard Rothe (1799–1867) and Isaak August Dorner (1809–1884) both are mediating theologians, but they are also called speculative thinkers (and rightly so).

302

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

Second, the problem of mediation has accompanied Christian theology from its beginnings. A central question of the New Testament has been to mediate between the proclamation of Jesus Christ as Savior and the Jewish scriptures. What does the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or the “Christ-event,” entail for the understanding of God, creation, salvation, evil, human existence, and other theological matters? From early on, Christian theologians have used the wisdom and imagination of the world, including philosophical concepts, in their answers and arguments. In a way, Christian theology has always been mediating theology. Systematically, the main issue throughout the centuries has been the relationship between faith and reason. Various solutions or constructions are possible, for example, the two-books model (Augustine), the nature-grace-model (Thomas Aquinas), the law-gospel model (Martin Luther), and the reason-revelation model (Descartes and the Enlightenment).6 In order to understand the peculiarities of nineteenth-century theology, we have to take into account that the reasonrevelation model is not the same as the nature-grace model. Whereas Scholastic theologians used reason and philosophical arguments in the context of an internal perspective of faith, Enlightenment philosophers, whether they were rationalists like Spinoza and Leibniz or empiricists like Locke, argued from an external perspective and held that there is one truth, not only ontologically (as in the nature-grace model) but also epistemologically. Faith and revelation were judged according to the demands of reason as “our last judge and guide in everything.”7 While Locke himself could accept the content of Christian revelation, as long as it did not contradict the judgments of reason, many theologians felt that they had to choose between two equally problematic possibilities: either their truth claims could be justified philosophically or they were irrational. In the wake of Immanuel Kant’s critique of rational proofs for the existence of God, the German debate between faith and reason found its foremost expression in the opposition between two schools, rationalism and supranaturalism. Both sides shared Kant’s conviction that religion belongs not to the realm of scientific knowledge but to the realm of ethics and morality. Like Pietism they were more interested in the Bible and in Christianity as a historical religion than in the sophisticated conceptual definitions of seventeenth-century Protestant orthodoxy. They disagreed, however, on the status of reason in theology and gave different answers to the question of whether it was necessary for religious persons to believe in a supernatural divine revelation. For rationalism, Christianity was a religion of practical reason. Its truth depended on its conformity to practical reason and the moral law. According to Julius August Ludwig Wegscheider (1771–1849), revelation was not an immediate communication of supernatural truths but the historical mediation of superior insight and behavior. God showed His benevolence by sending special persons or “wise men” as mediators. The premium example of such a person was Jesus of Nazareth, who taught humankind to find the way toward salvation through moral striving and a righteous life before God. The Bible was seen as an aid to discern the moral law but remained subject to historical criticism.

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

303

For supranaturalist theologians, the truth of Christianity was not comprehended or measured by reason alone. Gottlob Christian Storr (1746–1805), referring to Kant’s critique, argued that reason cannot be the last judge in supernatural matters and that the authority of the moral law depended on God, who guaranteed its validity. For an adequate assessment of the Bible, moral ideas did not suffice. Revelation was also necessary, and it was seen as plausible, even on historical grounds, due to the reliability of the biblical witness. Jesus proved his mission through moral behavior and miracles. He acted with divine authority when he gave his disciples the task of spreading his teachings. Therefore, the writings of the New Testament, which were traditionally ascribed to the apostles or other disciples, were also authoritative. Despite his time-bound assumptions about the historical reliability of the Bible, Storr’s willingness to defend claims about religion and revelation on the basis of rational philosophical standards represented a step forward. The discussion about faith and reason had reached a new stage. Leaving behind the rationalists’ belief that Christianity was essentially a natural religion of practical reason, Storr argued that knowledge of God, mediated by revelation, was necessary for human beings and their morality. Thus, a central question for the theological discourse of the next decades was put on the table: could the truth and validity of Christianity be demonstrated anthropologically, but without recourse to natural theology, by arguing that knowledge of God was necessary for human beings?8 The theological protagonists in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century were Schleiermacher and Marheineke, who both taught in Berlin.9 Schleiermacher understood dogmatic theology as a reflection on Christian piety and its articulations in history, whereas Marheineke developed a speculative theology of revelation. Despite their differences, both opted for a clear distinction between morality and religion. The answers of rationalism and supranaturalism were no longer a viable option for them, and they searched for alternatives. Still, the conflict between rationalism and supranaturalism did not abate. Between 1815 and 1844, Wegscheider’s rationalist Dogmatics appeared in eight editions. It was influential among pastors and parishioners.10 In turn, polemical attacks against rationalism continued. Its opponents complained that the rationalist teachings would undermine the religious and moral authority of the Bible and were not compatible with the true Christian faith. Third, the will to overcome the stale confrontation and to offer an alternative was the driving force behind the foundation of the journal Theologische Studien und Kritiken, which appeared for the first time in 1828, and marked the beginning of mediating theology.11 The editors of the journal were Carl Ullmann (1796–1865), Friedrich Wilhelm Carl Umbreit (1795–1860), Johann Carl Ludwig Gieseler (1792–1854), Friedrich Lücke (1791–1855), and Carl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787– 1868). The official announcement of the new publication in June 1827, prepared by Ullmann and Lücke, claimed that there never could be too many “true mediations.” It rejected the “eclectic confusion of differences” and the “vanity of arbitrary

304

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

mediation.”12 The last comment indicated the journal’s opposition to Hegelian thinking, especially in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, which began publication in January 1827. Instead of a speculative dialectic, always leading to new syntheses and never coming to a standstill, the editors of Theologische Studien und Kritiken set themselves the task of demonstrating the relativity of contrasting positions and looking for a fundamental agreement behind the apparent contrasts. They thought it necessary for the “true blossoming of theology” that faith and knowledge “become friends and get through to each other.” The “highest goal is to establish ever more points of unifying agreement among the quarreling parties, through faithful adherence to the positive foundation in Holy Scripture, through free and diligent historical as well as philosophical inquiry, and through impartial (unpartheiische) criticism, which can acknowledge the true and the good wherever it may be found.”13 This programmatic announcement clearly shows the influence of Schleiermacher and his endeavor to pay equal respect to religious and scientific interests. In 1829, the journal published Schleiermacher’s two letters to Friedrich Lücke regarding the first edition of The Christian Faith (1821–1822). The second letter14 discusses possible responses to the challenge to traditional Christian beliefs presented by the rise of empirical science. Schleiermacher articulates three basic convictions.15 First, the Christian faith must not cling to literalist views of creation in “six days,” or to miracle stories. Such immunization against the results of independent scientific exploration is regressive – Schleiermacher even speaks of “barbarism” – and reveals a lack of self-confidence. The rationalistic attempt to adapt the contents of Christian doctrine to modern science is equally problematic, because then faith is merely a belief in or affirmation of scientific hypotheses, which are subject to change. Second, Schleiermacher accepts the historical-critical approach to the Bible but insists that theologians have to offer more than facts about the life of Jesus or enthusiastic descriptions of his piety and morality. Historicist interpretation will not suffice to discover the “divine revelation in the person of Jesus.”16 Third, while Schleiermacher rejects the separation of theology and science, he says that a synthesis of religion and philosophy, which his philosophical critics advocate, is unwarranted. He had affirmed already an independence of religion from metaphysics and ethics in his Speeches on Religion (1799), and in The Christian Faith he emphasizes the historical character of the Christian faith. He refuses to transcend the conflict between biblical and scientific worldviews through a speculative foundation in the unity of divine and human natures. Such an idealistic foundation of faith renders personal beliefs superfluous and leads to an elitism, where only a few persons have access to true knowledge, while the mass of believers abide in ignorance. Fourth, let us consider the meaning of “mediation” in more detail. The term itself was made famous by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who took the Platonic dialectic to a higher level, working his way through the antithesis, with the goal of establishing a new ontotheology. In the Aristotelian

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

305

tradition, however, mediation was the attempt to find the truth in the middle point between the opposed positions. This understanding of the term became widespread after the publication of Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon’s two volumes on the comparison of and mediation between “extreme” standpoints in history, politics, philosophy, and poetry.17 In particular, Ancillon asked for the right balance between faith and reason. Hence, some historians understandably defined the main goal of mediating theologians as the mediation between supranaturalism and rationalism.18 Such a definition, however, requires careful qualification. One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Rudolf Hagenbach had already warned against a simple fusion of supranaturalism and rationalism into an “odd something-in-between,” which “robbed both of their best: supranaturalism of its religious depth and rationalism of its critical sharpness.”19 Two questions are relevant here: what is mediated, and how does mediation take place? Clearly, mediating theologians had more than one mediation in mind. The opposed pairs in need of mediation were faith and knowledge or religion and modern science, but also faith and (biblical or confessional) tradition. Furthermore, mediation was relevant for specific doctrines, particularly in Christology, between the dogmatic Christ and the historical Jesus. Equally important was the mediation between academic theology and the life of the church with its various fractions or parties, which already played an important role for Schleiermacher. In the widest sense of the term, mediating theologians represented the middle ground between the “extremes” of liberal theology and confessionalist theology. While definite answers to the first question above are possible, the second is more difficult to answer, since there is no standard method for the process of mediation. In the 1850s, the term “mediating theology” was used increasingly in a negative sense, in order to ascribe to someone an attitude of halfhearted conviction and an unwillingness to commit themselves to one theological position. The expressed goal to mediate or reconcile contrasting viewpoints could hinder the development of conceptual clarity and intellectual rigor.20 In the 1830s, however, the situation was more fluid, and several theologians offered positive definitions. Ullmann, for example, defined mediation as “the scientifically executed reduction of relative contrasts to their original unity, whereby their inner reconciliation and a higher standpoint is achieved, in which they are preserved; the scientific situation which is the result of this mediation is the true, healthy middle.”21 Although he does not define what “scientifically” means, we can glimpse the unity Ullmann has in mind from his reference to the unity of God and humankind in the person of Christ. It shows us that revelation and reason are essentially “one.” Jesus Christ, “in his full divine-human personality, in the … fullness of his essence, is … the true middle, the mediator between God and humankind.”22 A truly scientific theology elaborates comprehensively on all elements of Christ’s appearance, in order to arrive at the truth. Christology therefore became the central doctrine for many mediating theologians. Their goal was to mediate the ancient Christological dogma with the

306

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

results of historical inquiries into the Gospel stories. Even before David Friedrich Strauss published his radical critique of the Gospel stories (The Life of Jesus, 1835), the problem had become a principal one: did the historical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth play a role in dogmatic reflection? Ullmann believed that it did, as far as the effect of Christ is concerned. In his apologetic study on the sinlessness of Jesus, he used Schleiermacher’s conception of Christ as the ideal human being (Urbild) and pointed to the undeniable “impression” of Christ’s life on others, as witnessed by the New Testament writings.23 The “overwhelming experience of this life itself ”24 effected a new religious consciousness (redemption from sin) and a new ethical life (communion with God). This effect led to specific conclusions about the redeemer himself. Christ acted according to “the simple, grand principle to fulfill the will of God out of free love.”25 The generation of the Christian church could only be explained as a real, historical effect of Christ’s personality, since a “life of this kind could not have been invented.”26 Christ was the true revelation of God and, as the mediator between God and humankind, the prime example of the divine-human unity, for which humankind as a whole was destined. Another contribution of mediating theologians was the rediscovery of the doctrine of the immanent or essential Trinity. For soteriological purposes, Nitzsch found it necessary to go beyond Schleiermacher’s position in The Christian Faith and relate the being of God not only to the world, to Christ, and to the Christian church, but also to God’s own life. He was aware that such a procedure was speculative but argued that it corresponded to the character of the Christian faith: “faith in Christ is a cognition of God, which is a cognition of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”27 The believer’s “spiritual being” was dependent on a “threefold divine origin” (Urhebung) that was “one in essence.”28 August Twesten agreed that the particular Christian consciousness of redemption was the foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and observed that God’s self-revelation had to show God’s true being, otherwise something else than God was revealed.29 The one divine selfconsciousness, or personality, included three different moments: the revealer, the principle of revelation, and the communication of revelation. Lücke observed, however, that it remained unclear to what extent these moments represented real distinctions in the being or essence of God. If one conceived the immanent Trinity on the basis of the idea of the divine self-consciousness, the divine persons could not be distinguished adequately, whereas in the Trinitarian history of God’s kingdom (economic Trinity), Father and Son were clearly two different subjects.30 These considerations were developed further by Theodor Liebner (1806– 1871), who put the doctrine of the Trinity at the head of his dogmatics. For Liebner, God is “absolute love eternally realized in itself, or the good that is eternally real; both are identical.”31 He defines love as self-communication, so that the idea of God has to be Trinitarian. God is the “absolute personality,” constituted through God’s self-differentiation as Father, Son, and Spirit. The divine hypostases “Father” and “Son” are persons in and through their reciprocal selfgiving, whereby the Spirit “mediates”32 the unity-in-difference of Father and

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

307

Son. The idea of God’s absolute personality brings us to Dorner, for whom it serves as a central tenet of Trinitarian thinking, although he rejects Liebner’s concept of three divine persons and instead emphasizes that God remains identical in God’s self-differentiation.

The Systematic Theology of Isaak August Dorner (1809–1884) Isaak August Dorner was born on June 20, 1809, in the small town of Neuhausen ob Eck in South Germany (Württemberg). His father was a Protestant minister.33 His career followed a straight path. He studied theology and philosophy in Tübingen and served for two years as curate (Vikar) in the parish of his father. In 1837, after three years as tutor in Tübingen, he was made professor extraordinarius. In 1839, he was appointed as Professor of Protestant Theology at the University of Kiel, where he stayed until 1843. He held positions in Königsberg (1843–1846), Bonn (1847–1853), and Göttingen (1853–1862), until he received a call from the prestigious University of Berlin (1862–1883), where he also became a member of the Protestant Consistorial Council. From early on, Dorner was interested in the topic of church constitutions.34 He supported the separation of church and state in Prussia, one of the few lasting results of the March revolt in 1848, and defended the union of Lutheran and Calvinist churches in the synods of Prussia. In many letters, he expressed his desire for the formation of an ecumenical Protestant church. Dorner’s first major publication appeared in two successive articles and dealt with contemporary trends in the development of Christology (Über die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Christologie, besonders in den neueren Zeiten, 1835–1836). He expanded it into a whole history of Christology (Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die neuesten). The first edition was published in 1839, the second edition (in two parts and four volumes) between 1845 and 1856. In the preface to the last volume, he explains that the core of Protestant piety is “the fact of justification through faith in Christ,” while the center of Christian doctrine is “the dogma of the person of Christ.”35

Faith and doctrine Dorner developed his dogmatics in the tradition of Schleiermacher as System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, published between 1879 and 1881. Its starting point is the certitude of faith seeking understanding. It proceeds a posteriori from the experience of faith and follows logical rules, in order to arrive at the scientific truth about faith. The work consists of two parts: the first offers an apologetic fundamental doctrine (Fundamentallehre, §§ 15–70), and the second develops a special doctrine of faith (specielle Glaubenslehre, §§ 71–155). The material task of systematic or “thetical” theology, including dogmatics and ethics, is to present

308

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

Christianity as the truth. Dorner begins with a general doctrine or phenomenology of faith (Pisteologie, §§ 2–14), which is the precondition of knowing Christianity as the truth. Dorner wants to demonstrate what kind of faith leads to religious certitude. The phenomenology of faith describes the successive stages of human belief, “up to the point of where the union with objective Christianity in its centre is achieved.”36 Formally, Dorner defines “certitude or conviction in general” as the coincidence of object and subject in a human consciousness. Religious certitude differs in content, but not in form, from other kinds of certitude. It is an immediate certitude, like the certitude of “axiomatic truths, i.e., thoughts that only need to be thought, in order to be immediately evident,” or the certitude “that comes from experience, internal or external intuition.”37 Its object, however, is special. Whereas the immediate certitude of finite things is limited to the temporal presence of the object, God is omnipresent, and “contact with Him can be sought in every moment in prayer and contemplation.” Moreover, religious immediacy can accompany the “mediating operations of scientific thinking about God and divine things,” when they are performed in the “spirit of prayer.”38 The bodies and souls of human beings are open to the world as well as to God through their ethical constitution, which forms the inner “core of the individual personality.” Hence, the God-consciousness is the “true fortress of our self-consciousness” and our consciousness of the world.39 The center or base (Grund) of the Christian faith, as one historical religion among others, is God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, in whose person humankind is redeemed and perfected. The religious certitude of the Christian faith appears in three successive stages. The first stage is a certitude based on the historical authority of the common faith in the church or the record of Scripture. Yet, the “religious desire demands an encounter with the living God, not simply with teachings or past history.” Historical probability “is not knowledge, but only opinion,”40 and depends on changing authorities. The inquiring subject remains in uncertainty and doubt, still alienated from the truth. Thus, he or she seeks help, on the second stage, in the ideal of eternal truths, axioms, or laws, which are without history (geschichtslos). The ideal of Christianity, however, is different, since it aims at historical realization and claims to possess “absolute reality” in the person of Christ, whose historical reality is of lasting significance. Ethical ideas may demand the good, or communion with God, but they do not produce it; hence, they cannot give religious certitude. Thought alone, even in the form of the idea of God, “neither makes nor is pious.”41 In order to achieve the highest form of knowledge and certitude, philosophy needs to be superseded by religion, not vice versa (as Hegel thought). After two futile attempts to achieve religious certitude either through history or through thought, a third stage offers the solution, based on experience and “ethical-religious self-knowledge.”42 Since religion aims at “the constitution of a new personality,”43 the uncertainty and doubt of the subject seeking certitude turn inward and are directed against the idea of his or her excellence. The first thing

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

309

that we know with certainty is “that we are not as we should be.”44 The ethical conflict within the subject does not lead to resignation but to insight into the need for reconciliation, which makes possible the transition from religious doubt to religious certitude through contrition. The message of the Gospel transforms the doubt and self-condemnation of the subject into forgiveness, and promises the certitude of justification to those who believe in Christ. The religious desire that has been awakened moves beyond its subjectivity and finds the way to “religious objectivity,” to the self-communication of the living God, especially in the love encounter (Liebesbegegnung) with human beings in history.45 Three media represent God’s being-with-us: the religious community and the Word of God in the biblical Scriptures are witnesses to Jesus Christ, while the sacraments are the personal communication of God’s free grace. The certitude of the Christian faith is reached when the testimony of the Holy Spirit is recognized not only externally but also internally, when the objective “content of salvation is written on our heart, as it were.”46 The object of faith is God as revealed in Jesus Christ, God who thinks of us, loves us, and knows those who belong to Him. Revelation is not a thing of the past but entails a new self-consciousness and world-consciousness. The last section of the Glaubenslehre marks the transition from Christian certitude to the reflexive certitude of the truth of the Christian faith, which is the theme of the “thetic theology” developed in the two main parts of the System der christlichen Glaubenslehre. A “living faith has an inner desire and necessity to know itself and its foundation, and where this occurs, scientific certitude is added to religious certitude.”47 Before Dorner begins with the development of his systematic theology, he reflects on dogmatic method. Christian systematic theology, he says, is not merely empirical and reflective but also constructive and progressive. In contrast to Schleiermacher, he argues that faith is not only the knowledge of redemption but also the knowledge of the redeeming God. Such knowledge is not achieved through a regress from the effect of redemption to its cause, because the consciousness of redemption already presupposes a particular consciousness of God. Faith always implies an immediate knowledge of God as its basis. Hence, the doctrine of faith is not a description of the pious Christian mind (Gemüt). The foundation of Christianity is God, the object of faith, not faith itself. The Christian concept of God is the supreme concept of dogmatic theology. It is not only coherent with but also the completion of human reason. Christianity proclaims the “absolute revelation” of the divine Logos in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Logos.48 This fundamental doctrine aims at the objective truth and foundation of the Christian faith through the “scientific cognition … that Jesus Christ is the Godman.”49 The doctrine of God plays an important apologetic role. Dorner argues that we cannot speak scientifically about religion, revelation, Scripture, and other dogmatic topics, before we know God and the destination of humankind. Hence, the first part (§§ 15–37) of his systematic theology develops the doctrine of God in three sections: (a) God’s being, essence, and attributes; (b) God’s inner life (the immanent Trinity); and (c) God’s relation to the world (creation,

310

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

preservation, and providence). The second part (§§ 38–45) deals with creation (cosmology and anthropology). The third part (§§ 46–70) explains the fellowship of God and human beings in two sections: (a) religion, revelation (including miracles and biblical inspiration), and their perfection in God’s Menschwerdung or the Gottmenschheit; and (b) religion in historical perspective, which deals with non-Christian religions and with Christianity as the absolute religion realized in Jesus as the historical appearance of the God-man. The second part of Dorner’s System develops the special doctrine of faith (specielle Glaubenslehre, §§ 71–155), which elaborates on the foundation laid in the first part. The dual structure (sin versus salvation) is very similar to the second part of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith. It deals with sin (§§ 71–89), the person and work of Christ (§§ 90–128), and the Christian church as the “kingdom of the Holy Spirit” (§§ 129–155).

Themes throughout Dorner’s career Two themes occupied Dorner throughout his career: the Trinity and Christology; both, of course, fundamental doctrines in the history of Christian theology. In Dorner’s system they are closely related. From early on, he was convinced that a Trinitarian concept of God was necessary for a proper understanding of the person of Christ. The goal of the doctrine of the Trinity is to establish the concept of God’s personality as a result of God’s “eternal self-differentiation” and “equally eternal return into Himself.”50 Dorner argues that the divine unity is not simply an abstract presupposition of the doctrine of God as constituted by the three divine hypostases. He rejects the concept of three “persons” prevalent in the Latin tradition, since the modern concept of “person” implies an individual Ego. Instead, he follows the Greek tradition and speaks of three “modes-of-being”51 that are “eternal points of mediation of the absolute divine personality.”52 Each of the three modes-of-being refers to the other two and is conditioned by them. Dorner argues that there exists an “internal homogeneity” of Trinitarian thinking and the “evangelical principle of faith.” He wants to go beyond the conception of the sixteenth-century Reformers and to develop a theological, not merely anthropological, foundation of the Christian personality, defined as a “living unity” of necessity and freedom.53 He points out that a person’s reconciliation of the opposite poles of necessity and freedom in himself or herself corresponds to the ethical unity of necessity and freedom in God. The Trinitarian concept of God perfects the philosophical concepts of God. Although the unity of God is a concept of human reason as such, the specific Christian understanding of God demands the recognition of God’s triunity. Dorner’s doctrine of the Trinity completes his doctrine of divine attributes, offering a Trinitarian definition of (God as) absolute being, absolute knowledge or self-consciousness, and absolute will; or a physical, logical, and ethical

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

311

construction of the Trinity. The physical construction54 defines God as dynamic aseity and self-foundation (Selbstbegründung) or self-generation. God is effective (wirkender) as well as the effect (das Gewirkte). The relation between the two is mediated by a third moment, which preserves their difference-in-unity. In this model, which corresponds to older insights of the Greek Church Fathers, God is a living unity. The logical construction55 defines God as dynamic self-consciousness. God possesses knowledge of others and of Himself. Knowledge presupposes a subject and an object. Again, the two poles are related; each needs the other. This is true for the human self-consciousness as well as the divine selfconsciousness. The cognition of the unity of the two modes-of-being is only possible through a third factor, the Holy Spirit. Hence, the Father not only is conscious of the Son (and vice versa), but also recognizes himself in the other (and vice versa). The divine unity is the result of mutual self-recognition.56 The ethical construction57 offers a Trinitarian definition of love, by describing the ethical triunity of the divine will. For Dorner, the construction offered by Ernst Sartorius (1797–1859) does not grasp the distinction between the hypostases and achieves only a threefold repetition of the same, that is, “three absolute loving persons” or “personalities.”58 One should not simply presuppose the concept of love for the Trinitarian process. Instead, the three hypostases constitute the divine being, self-consciousness, and will, as Liebner has argued. At the same time, Dorner rejects Liebner’s kenotic conception, in which love is defined primarily as self-giving, especially the self-giving of the Son toward the Father. Instead, he defines love as self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung) or self-determination. Dorner faces the classical dilemma for any definition of God’s will and God’s ethical being: does God will the good because it is good, or is it good because God wills it? He resolves the dilemma with the idea that God chooses the good freely. Both propositions are true: God wills the good because it is good, and it is good because God wills it. God’s being is not simple but many times different (mehrfach verschieden). In God’s being, ethical necessity and freedom belong together and condition each other. The ethically necessary is logically prior, because otherwise God’s choice of the good would be arbitrary and not free. Dorner identifies the first divine mode-of-being, the “holy necessity of the good,”59 with the Father. Moreover, the ethical concept of God implies a second aspect: the free generation of the good, which is the presupposition of God’s ethical self-realization as absolute personality and “living love.” The second divine mode-of-being, “in the form of freedom” but with an “inner relation” to the ethically necessary,60 is the Son. Finally, the Holy Spirit makes it possible for Father and Son to recognize themselves in and through each other. The third divine mode-of-being is the “bond of unity,” which “mediates eternally” the interplay of necessity and freedom, that is, the “absolute, self-conscious, free love. For love is the unity of ethical necessity and freedom.”61 In short, the Holy Spirit reveals the ethical being of God. God’s self-love and self-assertion are not limited to God’s self but are in perfect harmony with God’s self-communication toward the world. God has an “inner tendency” toward the communication of

312

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

love,62 and when God loves Himself, He already loves the good as such. Hence, the fundamental connection between religion and ethics is proven. The last paragraph of the section on the immanent Trinity asks how God is present and can reveal Himself in each of the three hypostases. The absolute personality is the eternal result or “product”63 of the three modes-of-being, as the classical concept of an eternal perichoresis (mutual indwelling) of the three hypostases emphasized. The divine unity is a unity-in-difference, while the three different modes-of-being never exist apart from their unity. The “divine life-system” is an “organism” brought forth by its Trinitarian mutually conditional “members.”64 In every organism, the activities of the whole and its parts coincide. The divine personality exists differently in each of the three modesof-being; it grants each of them a share in the divine unity and thus also in the other two modes. At this point, the question arises how the three modes-ofbeing are defined. Since Dorner’s constructive proposal includes a physical Trinity, a logical Trinity, and an ethical Trinity, there is not one Trinitarian structure but there are three structures. What is missing in his system, however, is an exploration of the connections between the three structures and their respective definitions of the triadic Father-Son-Spirit.65

Christology in Dorner’s thinking Besides the Trinity, Christology has a special place in Dorner’s thinking. Both topics are closely related through the proposition that God was present in Jesus Christ, while only the “person” of the Logos was incarnate in him. Dorner’s studies on the topic in the 1830s and 1840s criticized the Gattungschristologie of David Friedrich Strauss and another liberal theologian, Ferdinand Christian Baur. They set forth the idea of Christ as Central-Individuum, which stresses the individuality and universality of Christ as the Second Adam, that is, the representation and perfection of human nature. In his publications from 1850 onward, Dorner was engaged in critical discussion with the kenotic conceptions of Lutheran theologians, sharing their interest in the true humanity of Christ but rejecting the thesis that the incarnate Logos relinquished his divine attributes until his death.66 In a letter to Dorner from March 1842, Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884) defines the relation of Christ’s “historical individuality” as a human being to the “second person of the trinity”67 as the main theme of Christology. The question is how to understand the union of a human and a divine “nature” without having to assume two persons in Christ. Dorner affirms a development of Christ’s person, which reaches its goal in the ascension, when the righteousness and love of the Logos are fully shared with the person of Christ. Dorner grants a self-limitation (Selbstbeschränkung) of the Logos’ communication with human “nature” but not a self-diminution as in kenotic Christologies, because this would contradict the concept of God’s self-revelation. “The Logos of the Trinity must have become

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

313

human, no less and no other.”68 While Jesus of Nazareth is not a separate person, his consciousness is different from the consciousness of the Logos, although their content is the same, namely, the divine-human unity. But does this model leave room for a “communication of attributes” between the divine and the human side? Due to the terminology of two “personalities,” the personal unity of the Logos and Christ’s humanity remains in doubt. Eventually, Dorner drops the concept of “person” from his doctrine of the Trinity and explains that the three divine modesof-being possess their personality only in and through their relation to each other. The Logos as such has no personality or self-consciousness of his own. The second volume of Dorner’s System der christlichen Glaubenslehre presents his mature Christology. The unity of God and humankind in Christ is now based explicitly on the conception of the Trinity as a dynamic unity in three modes-ofbeing. The characteristic distinction between the divine and the human in Christ also includes their connection. Whereas the divine “nature” is transparent and communicative, the human “nature” is in need of and “receptive to God,”69 to the fullness of God’s life, God’s will, and God’s ethical being as love. The content of the self-consciousness of the person of Christ is the divine-human unity in which the Logos communicates Himself, while the human side receives His selfcommunication. The form of the divine-human personality is human, and its content is divine.70 The forming principle is the human self-consciousness. The Logos seems to “dominate”71 the unity itself through his self-communication as the second divine mode-of-being, although he does not communicate the absolute divine personality. God’s Menschwerdung is not completed in one act but must be conceived “as continuing, even growing.”72 It is a dynamic union of consciousness and will, in which the human side recognizes the existing unity with the Logos gradually, and not at once. Initially, only God’s conscious will is present. The human self-actualization and conscious presence develop in a process that is stimulated by an innate natural desire. God knows the union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ from the beginning, whereas the God-man understands himself as such only when he has become a self-conscious personality.73 Dorner’s attempt to hold together the ontological and the ethical side of Christ’s divine-humanity (Gottmenschheit) is highly sophisticated. At the same time, the question remains whether the gradual self-communication of the divine being implies a gradual unification of the Logos with human nature, or whether the conscious acquiring of the divine-humanity occurs on the basis of a complete self-communication of the divine being, which is then actualized and developed continuously in the self-consciousness of Christ.74

Conclusion Dorner’s theology represents the climax of Trinitarian thinking in the nineteenth century. Its goal is to emphasize at the same time God’s independence from the world (against pantheism) and God’s self-communication toward the world

314

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

(against deism). Dorner’s insistence on a Trinitarian concept and doctrine of God is groundbreaking, despite the fact that he treats the doctrine of the Trinity after the doctrine of the essence and attributes of God. The explanation of the divine unity as the result of the relations between the three modes-of-being continues to play an important role in Trinitarian thinking.75 The concept of self-differentiation ensures that the act of creation is neither arbitrary nor foreign to God’s being, a theme that has received a lot of attention in recent discussions about the relation between the immanent and the economic Trinity. The divine selfconsciousness always includes and affirms a “possible Other.”76 The actualization of this Other in the act of creation has its foundation in the ethical being of God, that is, God’s free love and its will for the good as such. God’s providence is not the command of an autocratic ruler but is realized through the relation between God and God’s creation. God participates in the life of creation, on the basis of divine ethical immutability.77 Dorner’s Trinitarian reflections and his lively debates with other theologians prove that it is wrong to say that doctrine of the Trinity “had been all but forgotten in modern academic theology.”78 The opposite is true: Trinitarian thinking received renewed attention in modern Protestant theology after Schleiermacher and Hegel, and mediating theologians played a major role in the process. The Trinitarian discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century was motivated by the conviction that abstract notions of God’s unity and oneness remained insufficient. Dorner’s formulation that God’s being is not simple but “many times different” (mehrfach verschieden)79 could come straight from a textbook on Process theology. If “relationality” and “difference” are characteristic signs of contemporary theology,80 Dorner (and not only he) has anticipated this trend by more than a century. This does not make him postmodern or a panentheist, as his rejection of kenotic Christologies shows, but it demands a more nuanced conversation about the implications for God’s being of God’s history with the world.

Notes 1 “The concept is not definite, thus it is difficult to determine the affiliation … to this grouping”; Michael Murrmann-Kahl, “Vermittlungstheologie,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. G. Müller, vol. 34 (Berlin: 2002), 730. 2 See the pointed critique by Karl Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: 1856), 248–279. Karl Heinrich Wilhelm Schwarz (1812–1885) was a liberal theologian, and from 1849 until 1856 Professor of Theology at the University of Halle, before he was called to serve as Court Chaplain in Gotha. He complained that the “old” mediation theology led to a “popularization and weakening of Schleiermacherian thought” (Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten, 248). In the end, its positions are “unclear and untrue” (Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten, 428). 3 Cf. Albrecht Ritschl, Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion und ihre Nachwirkungen auf die evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (Bonn: 1874), 94–107. Ritschl mentions a group of church representatives with a particular interest in the debate surrounding an

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

315

independent constitution of the German Protestant Church, without interference from the Prussian state. Ritschl does not call the group by a name, but it is clear that he has mediating theologians in mind. Hirsch emphasizes the similarities between Hegel and Schleiermacher. Thus, he speaks of only two movements: “speculative mediation theology” and “confessional experiential theology.” The first category includes speculative theologians in the tradition of Hegel, like Philipp Marheineke (1780–1846) and Carl Daub (1765–1836). See Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neuern evangelischen Theologie im Zusammenhang mit den allgemeinen Bewegungen des europäischen Denkens, vol. 5 (Gütersloh: 1964), 364–366. Historically, we have to distinguish more clearly between speculative and mediating theologians. Karl Barth, Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert. Ihre Vorgeschichte und Geschichte (Zurich: 1946), 461. Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: 1988), 67–98. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, 19, 14, ed. A. C. Fraser (New York: 1959), 438. Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Problemgeschichte der neueren evangelischen Theologie in Deutschland (Göttingen: 1997), 43. Schleiermacher from 1810 until 1834, and Marheineke from 1811 until 1846. “While Schleiermacher researched, [Wegscheider] educated. While Schleiermacher became famous, [Wegscheider] was read”; Barth, Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, 425. The publisher of the journal, Friedrich Christoph Perthes (1772–1843), remarked in 1825, “One may not separate religion and theology, religious feeling and knowledge, faith and science.” Cited in Friedemann Voigt, Vermittlung im Streit. Das Konzept theologischer Vermittlung in den Zeitschriften der Schulen Schleiermachers und Hegels (Tübingen: 2006), 23. Cited in Alf Christophersen, Friedrich Lücke (1791–1855): vol. 2. Dokumente und Briefe (Berlin: 1999), 422. Christophersen, Friedrich Lücke, 422. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Dr. Schleiermacher über seine Glaubenslehre, an Dr. Lücke. Zweites Sendschreiben,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 2 (1829): 481– 532. Critical edition: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Theologisch-dogmatische Abhandlungen und Gelegenheitsschriften (Kritische Gesamtausgabe I/10), ed. H-F. Traulsen and M. Ohst (Berlin: 1990), 307–394. For the following, see Schleiermacher, Theologisch-dogmatische Abhandlungen, 345, lines 13–351, line 12. Ibid., 347, lines 23–24. Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon, Zur Vermittlung der Extreme in den Meinungen (Berlin: 1828/1831). See especially Ragnar Holte, Die Vermittlungstheologie. Ihre theologischen Grundbegriffe kritisch untersucht, (Uppsala: 1965). Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, Ueber die sogenannte Vermittlungstheologie (Zurich: 1858), 7, cited in Voigt, Vermittlung, 13. See Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten. Carl Ullmann, “Über Partei und Schule, Gegensätze und deren Vermittelung. Andeutungen,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 9 (1836): 41. The article is considered in detail by Voigt, Vermittlung, 84–88. Karl August von Hase (1800–1890),

316

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30

31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

who for more than fifty years was Professor of Theology in Jena, called his dogmatics a “theology of reconciliation between extremes,” i.e., rationalism and pantheistic philosophy. See the preface to his Evangelische Dogmatik, 4th ed. (Leipzig: 1850), xv. Ullmann, “Über Partei und Schule,” 57. Carl Ullmann, Die Sündlosigkeit Jesu (1828; 5th ed., Hamburg: 1863), 31–72. Ullmann, Die Sündlosigkeit Jesu, 100. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 216. Carl Immanuel Nitzsch, System der christlichen Lehre (1829; 4th ed., Bonn: 1839), 174. Hirsch, Geschichte der neuern evangelischen Theologie, 375, claims that Nitzsch’s work was “the most popular dogmatics of its age.” Its sixth and last edition appeared in 1851. Ullmann’s most successful book was The Essence of Christianity, published in five editions between 1845 and 1865. Nitzsch, System der christlichen Lehre, 164. August Detlev Christian Twesten, Vorlesungen über die Dogmatik der evangelischlutherischen Kirche, vol. 2 (Hamburg: 1837), 203. Twesten (1789–1876) was professor in Kiel and Berlin, where he succeeded Schleiermacher. Friedrich Lücke, “Fragen und Bedenken über die immanente Wesenstrinität, oder die trinitarische Selbstunterscheidung Gottes,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 13 (1840): 63–112, here 104–108. Lücke, like Schleiermacher, understood God in terms of absolute simplicity and unity. See the reconstruction of the debate by Christine Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens. Eine theologiegeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Glaube und Trinität in der Theologie Isaak August Dorners (Tübingen: 1990), 106–115. Karl Theodor Albert Liebner, Christologie oder die christologische Einheit des dogmatischen Systems (Göttingen: 1849), 71, cf. Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund, 108. The volume was the first (and remained the only) volume of his “Christian Dogmatics.” Liebner, Christologie, 119. The great majority of Protestant churches in Germany call themselves Evangelische Kirche. Since nowadays the term “evangelical” has a different meaning in the English-speaking world, I prefer to translate Evangelisch as Protestant instead of “Evangelical.” See Ritschl, Schleiermachers Reden. Isaak August Dorner, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi, nach dem Reformationszeitalter bis zur Gegenwart, part 2, vol. 2.2 (Berlin: 1856), iii. Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre: vol. 1. Grundlegung oder Apologetik, 2nd ed. (Berlin: 1886), 17. Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 55. Ibid., 58–59. Ibid., 60–61. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 105–106. Ibid., 118. Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens, 67. Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 1:124. Axt-Piscalar remarks that the consciousness of sin is the main reason for the “particularity, independence, and necessity of religion” over against philosophical speculation (Der Grund des Glaubens, 70).

MEDIATING THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68

317

Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 1:129–130. Ibid., 1:141 Ibid., 1:147. Ibid., 1:170. Ibid., 1:165. Ibid., 1:395. The German terms are Seinsweisen, Daseinsweisen, and Existenzweisen. They are used interchangeably. See ibid., 1:394, 1:417, and especially 1:430–434. Ibid., 1:367. Ibid., 1:400–401. Cf. Jörg Rothermundt, Personale Synthese. Isaak August Dorners theologische Methode (Göttingen: 1968). Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 1:403–405. Ibid., 1:405–409. Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens, 180, criticizes how in Dorner’s construction, the Holy Spirit “produces” the divine unity. Dorner, however, says that it “brings the essential unity-in-difference up into the [divine] consciousness.” Hence, the Holy Spirit is “logically … conditioned by the duality” of Father and Son. See Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 1:408. Ibid., 1:409–430. The ethical concept of God was a major theme in nineteenthcentury German Protestant theology. It was developed to counter pantheistic conceptions that did not distinguish clearly between God and the world, or tended to minimize the freedom of the individual. Ibid., 1:393, 1:409. Ibid., 1:416. Ibid., 1:417. Dorner refers to the voluntary obedience of the Son to the Father in the New Testament. Ibid., 1:420. It is misleading to call God a subject, because an absolute subject could also be understood as the incommunicable God of Deism. See ibid., 1:427 n. 1. Ibid., 1:427. Ibid., 1:431. Ibid., 1:432. See Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens, 190–191. The protagonist of kenotic theology was Gottfried Thomasius (1802–1875). The two different contexts that shaped Dorner’s Christology are reconstructed by Thomas Koppehl, Der wissenschaftliche Standpunkt der Theologie Isaak August Dorners (Berlin: 1997), 21–188. Cited in Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens, 221. For the following paragraph, see the reconstruction in Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens, 225–235. Isaak August Dorner, “Über die richtige Fassung des dogmatischen Begriffs der Unveränderlichkeit Gottes,” in: Gesammelte Schriften aus dem Gebiet der systematischen Theologie, Exegese und Geschichte (Berlin: 1883), 228. The study was published originally in the Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie (1856–1858). It offers a critique of kenotic Christology, a historical survey of the idea of divine immutability, and a proposal for a revised concept of ethical immutability. See Matthias Gockel, “On the Way from Schleiermacher to Barth: A Critical Reappraisal of Isaak August Dorner’s Essay on Divine Immutability,” Scottish Journal of Theology 53 (2000): 490–510.

318

MATTHIAS GOCKEL

69 Isaak August Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, vol. 2: Specielle Glaubenslehre, 2nd ed. (Berlin: 1887), 410. 70 System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 2:417–421. 71 Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens, 243. 72 Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 2:431. 73 Ibid., 2:436–438. 74 See Axt-Piscalar, Der Grund des Glaubens, 251–253. 75 See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: 1991), chap. 5.3. Dorner’s preference for the term “modes-of-being” was shared by Karl Barth; see Church Dogmatics I/1, §§ 8–12. 76 Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 1:452. 77 Ibid., 500. See also Dorner, “Über die richtige Fassung”; and Gockel, “On the Way.” 78 David S. Cunningham, “The Trinity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. K. J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge: 2003), 201 79 Dorner, System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 1:415. 80 Cunningham, “The Trinity,” 188–192.

Bibliography Axt-Piscalar, Christine. Der Grund des Glaubens. Eine theologiegeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Glaube und Trinität in der Theologie Isaak August Dorners. Tübingen: 1990. Welch, Claude. “Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” vol, 1:1799–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972, Chapter 12.

CHAPTER 15

America: Confessional Theologies James D. Bratt

The newly independent United States did not offer a propitious field for confessional theology at the start of the nineteenth century. Politics, moving through successive stages of protest, rebellion, reconstitution, and self-preservation, dominated American thought in the half century from 1765 to 1815, pushing theology to the side.1 The process of democratization unleashed by the War for Independence continued apace through the 1830s, registering in religion in the rise of such populist movements as the Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, and Universalists. These all attacked the authority of tradition, of elites, and of any European inheritance, rendering confessional standards triply suspect.2 Those among the learned who sought to defend received Protestant doctrine appealed, as did their opponents, to Enlightened standards of reason and evidence. Thus, divine benevolence and human happiness, natural law and rational coherence, moral governance and moral accountability set the terms of debate for the followers of Jonathan Edwards as much as for Deists and Unitarians.3 The traditional loci of theology, systematically arrayed in binding statements, offered dubious ground in such discourse. Appeals to Scripture were aplenty on all sides, but a Scripture to be assayed by canons of universal rationality. This clear-cutting of theological tradition was dramatically furthered by disestablishment and denominational pluralism, which made confessional particularity not only arbitrary in appearance but also optional in fact. Yet confessional theology survived these rigors and began to thrive again under the new cultural climate that obtained in the middle third of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s the heritage of the early church and Reformation was better known among American clergy, and more widely heard among their congregations than anyone in 1800 could have expected. This resurgence did not bring sweet accord, naturally, since Lutheran and Reformed communities were recovering different legacies. The rise of historical consciousness which fed

320

JAMES D. BRATT

confessional renewal left a divide of its own, since some parties in Lutheran and Reformed circles accepted a developmental understanding of their standards, while others viewed them as timeless formularies given once for all. Thus, the domain of nineteenth-century American confessional theology can be seen as divided into four quadrants; this essay will consider each of them in turn. We will begin with the ahistorical Reformed sector – the largest and oldest of the four, and the most distinguished by virtue of its chief occupant, the Princeton Theology. We will then move to the ahistorical Lutheran quadrant, where the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, led by Carl F. W. Walther, adhered (as its initials U.A.C. betokened) to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession. Other Lutherans, principally Charles Porterfield Krauth of the General Council of Lutheran synods, held to a more historically situated concept of the confessions. They themselves took inspiration from the historically minded in the Reformed camp, most notably John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, whose Mercersburg Theology arose in the German Reformed Church but came to influence American Protestantism at large. These varieties of confessional theology represented a significant achievement in their own right, and made a significant contribution to American thought as well, since theology was the first and, for most of the century, foremost scholarly field in the nation. But theology’s reach into local communities via pastors and teachers also made it unsurpassed as an intellectual resource for practical leadership. American theology, including confessional theology, therefore merits examination as a prism through which larger political and cultural worlds were refracted and illumined. The confessional projects are of particular interest on this score, for they all arose in locales close by the MasonDixon line, which, as the century proceeded, marked the most important divide in the nation’s policy and self-understanding. These were all border-state theologies, aiming to bridge that divide, whether by reason or by history; to escape it; or to secure apart from it a separate peace.4

The Princeton Theology The Presbyterian system propounded at Princeton Theological Seminary holds pride of place among the confessional – indeed, among all nineteenth-century – American schools for both intellectual heft and social influence. In its first hundred years (1812–1912), Princeton enrolled 1,000 more students than any other seminary in the country; Charles Hodge, Princeton’s leading light, taught more students in his fifty-year tenure (1829–1878) than attended any other postgraduate school in the United States.5 The Presbyterians’ strategic place in the young republic redoubled their influence. Unlike the Congregationalists, they were not isolated in one region but radiated out from their mid-Atlantic center deep into the South and the backcountry. Unlike the Baptists and Methodists, in promoting revivals they still insisted on an educated clergy, giving them perhaps

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

321

the most formidable network of local intellectual leadership in the nation. Unlike the Episcopalians and Quakers, they were firmly associated with the Patriot cause, not least because of the leading role played in that effort by John Witherspoon, who had arrived from Scotland in 1768 to become president of the College of New Jersey (later, Princeton College) and made it a font of revolutionary leadership. Dozens of Witherspoon’s students – most notably, James Madison – were members of the constitutional conventions, legislatures, courts, and executive offices which comprised the federal and state governments that replaced British rule.6 As a political theorist, Witherspoon instilled some premises that echoed long at Princeton College and Seminary alike: true liberty was defined as a restoration from oppression to proper order and was to be maintained by a public virtue superintended by enlightened Christian leadership. Thus revolution was not at odds with stability, nor faith with freedom, nor church with nation. Once achieved, such a complex required strict adherence to constitutions and a sensibility of compromise and moderation. An analogous approach marked Witherspoon’s religious thought. Quickly purging Edwardsean idealism from the Princeton curriculum, he replaced it with the philosophy of Common Sense regnant in his native Scotland. Witherspoon claimed that its rugged realism (in contrast to idealism’s dangerous “speculation”) blended the best of the new learning with the standards of biblical revelation to obviate any conflict between faith and reason. It fit Christianity to the maintenance of a moral republic as well. But Witherspoon’s harmonies barely survived the turn of the nineteenth century, and Presbyterian leaders felt compelled to found the seminary separate from the college in 1812. The distinctive theology that was born with that institution remained predicated on Common Sense philosophy, however. Adopting Thomas Reid’s epistemology, the Princeton theologians believed that the human mind was so created as to apprehend external data as they really were, not as they merely seemed to be. The mind could attain real truth by conforming its notions to the evidence of the objective world, a process composed of careful perception and inference. Here, Francis Bacon’s inductive, empiricist method came into play. Just as the scientist drew out the laws that lay objectively in the data, so the Christian theologian should work with the “facts” of the Bible to infer the system of doctrine which they contained and by which they operated. To Reid and Bacon the Princeton Theologians added a third component in Francis Hutcheson’s axioms about an innate moral sense, potentially as reliable as the physical senses and answering to a moral order as objective and law-abiding as the physical universe. Finally, they deemed the coherence within and between human perceptual apparatus and external cosmos to be not only a product but also a proof of divine creation, and sufficient for knowledge of God’s being and purpose. This turn from philosophy proper to natural theology led on to a sequence that they derived from Reformed tradition but presented in terms of logic, self-evidence, and probability. Human evil obscured natural revelation, though sin as such entailed moral resistance, not intellectual deficiency; God,

322

JAMES D. BRATT

being rational and law-abiding, bridged the gap with special revelation, manifestly the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; therefore, natural and scriptural revelation had to be in ultimate agreement, and scriptural data belonged properly in scientific theorizing.7 In this manner the Princeton theologians thought to establish Christianity as a – rather, the only – rational and demonstrable religion. Their argument left open not only significant philosophical issues but also some major questions within their received theological tradition about Christology, the noetic impact of sin, and the place of grace; these costs, however, were hidden at the time by the need to rout deism, “enthusiasm” (radical revivalism), and infidelity at their own game. Such, at any rate, was the belief of Archibald Alexander (1772– 1851), founder of the Princeton Theology proper. Alexander could honor heartfelt piety from his conversion experience in his native Virginia; his rationalist Princetonian colors came from his studies with a student of Witherspoon. Alexander took his special task as theologian to be warranting Scripture as a sound and trustworthy authority, and only then to explicate its contents. If he never got around to systematizing the results, he had absorbed such a system in his nurture under the Westminster Catechism and Confession, a nurture that would be assumed by all the Princeton theologians thereafter. If his argument for Scripture was largely evidentialist on the Baconian Enlightenment model, Alexander’s stress on Scripture qualifies as confessional theology since the Westminster Standards start there as well. Finally, his earnest preaching and pastoral counseling of students rounded out the model of piety meeting reason which Princeton ever set forth.8 Charles Hodge (1797–1878), Alexander’s loyal successor, magnified each of these traits over his half-century career of unwearied teaching and publication. He put Princeton Theology on the map by founding, editing, and contributing no less than 140 articles to the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, the most scholarly and widely read journal in America; and he left Princeton’s monument in his three-volume Systematic Theology (1871–1873). By virtue of his education not only at Princeton but also in long study tours in New England and Germany, where he was an American pioneer in graduate theological studies, Hodge was probably the best-versed theologian in the country.9 He was certainly the giant of his school. Hodge assumed Common Sense philosophy more than defended it and gave considerable attention to Scripture’s warrant, as had Alexander. But his major task was exfoliating scriptural contents and applying them to the many theological controversies of his times. To this project he brought a wide reading in Augustine and classic Reformed theologians, and a spirit of learned polemicism and attention to fine differences adopted from Reformed scholastics. In fact, Francois Turretin’s Institutio theologiae elencticae (1679–1685) served as the theology textbook at Princeton until Hodge published his own in the 1870s. While he was far from naïve in moving from Scripture to doctrine and was decidedly opposed to writing Roman Catholics (much less other Trinitarian Protestants)

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

323

out of the Kingdom, for Hodge the teaching of Scripture was best captured in Reformed theology, and Reformed theology was best captured in the Westminster Confession.10 From that point, he moved out to attack the sundry deviations he spied on the theological scene. These came in three clusters. The personal appreciation of Friedrich Schleiermacher and F. A. Tholuck he had gained on his German sojourn did not keep Hodge, back at Princeton, from issuing a steady critique of all “German” modes of thinking, “rationalist,” “mystical,” or “speculative” as they were. By the first, Hodge meant the biblical criticism pioneered by David W. Strauss and all naturalistic reductions of supernatural claims in Scripture or Confession. “Mystical” and “speculative” covered the products of Romantic and Idealist initiatives, respectively, including Schleiermacher’s lectures On Religion, Kant’s critiques and Coleridge’s redaction thereof, and symbolist understandings of language. He attacked what he took to be the American versions of these three errors in E. A. Parks’s theology of feelings, New England Transcendentalists’ exercises upon Coleridge, and Horace Bushnell’s “Dissertation on Language.”11 Secondly, Hodge was innocent of historical thinking and so had difficulty accepting any notion of the historical development of doctrine. He simply conflated his two principal authorities – Augustine and the Reformed scholastics – with little concern for the millennium that separated them or the contexts that might have shaped them. While he recognized the importance of institutional continuity in the preservation of Presbyterian orthodoxy, he had difficulty conceiving that anything besides verbal propositions really bore the truth. He could accept Roman Catholic baptism and correspond cordially with the Vatican, but he rejected its ecclesiology and papal pretensions. He befriended Anglicans but sniffed at apostolic succession. These animosities converged in the harsh polemic he carried on at midcentury with his once-favorite student, John Williamson Nevin. Nevin’s Calvinism was High Church, historical, and sacramental; Hodge’s, voluntarist, verbal, and decretal. So proximate in their loyalties, their differences magnified their hostilities.12 Hodge’s third and most frequent target, however, was homegrown. He disliked most of the theology that came out of New England after Edwards: not only Unitarianism, but also the New Divinity of Samuel Hopkins, the New Haven Theology of Nathaniel William Taylor, the popularized version of the latter disseminated by Charles Finney, and the romanticized reaction thereunto issuing from Horace Bushnell. All these were faulty, Hodge averred, for their “speculative” method. That is, although the first four shared his Common Sense Realism, they pursued their theological program out of a philosophical problematic rather than out of confessional givens and so had come to erroneous conclusions. Hodge focused particularly on their soteriology. The New Englanders except for Bushnell effectually trimmed the power or imputation of original sin so as to maintain, as they saw it, human moral accountability and divine moral government. Hodge shared their individualism enough to break with Augustine and see Adam’s guilt as being imputed to every person anew by divine decree, not carried

324

JAMES D. BRATT

by human inheritance, but otherwise he held comfortably to classic Westminster formulations and a thoroughgoing Augustinian psychology. Hodge also disagreed with New Englanders’ preference for the moral governance theory of Christ’s atonement, asserting the substitutionary model instead. He rejected the quasiArminian notion of human will and the semi-Pelagian notion of human merit that he saw operating in their revival practices, as well as the behavioral excesses of the revivals themselves.13 Here he commended Bushnell for urging a model of family nurture over against the others’ dependence on sudden conversion, though he was distressed that Bushnell could deny children’s total depravity at the same time that he reaffirmed their original sin. As for the rest of the Romantic side of the street, he deemed Theodore Parker guilty of Idealist pantheism, John Nevin of quasi-Romanism, and Bushnell of ambiguous symbolism – seeing more than one meaning in a word, seeing good as well as evil in the natural-born human heart.14 Hodge’s suspicion of New England’s theological innovations carried over to their civil politics. He deplored the perfectionist demands and accusatory rhetoric of Northern abolitionism as it unfolded over the 1830s and 1840s, arguing that the Bible did not condemn slavery as such. Until the late 1850s he did not examine actual slavery in the South, again focusing on abstract rules instead of particular historical realities. Judgments in the latter domain, he said, belonged to local church courts, much as Senator Stephen Douglas suggested for civil politics via the formula of “popular sovereignty.” Yet Hodge was averse to Douglas’s Democratic Party, having Federalist parents and a Whig-Republican voting record of his own. His political lodestar was the Constitution – the civil analogue of the Westminster Confession in religion – with its provision of clear substance, bounds, and procedures. Thus he justified the Civil War as being fought for national self-preservation, not first of all for abolition. Yet he came increasingly to detest slavery as a system, particularly when its Southern supporters warranted it as a positive good rather than a necessary evil, as racially justified by supposed Black inferiority, and as deserving expansion into new territories rather than accepting restriction to its traditional domain. Hodge was realistic enough not to be surprised by the aftermath of the Civil War; yet, having always been more attracted to the Republicans’ emphasis on moral control and national unity than to their enthusiasm for economic development, the Gilded Age had to disappoint him. He ended his days as he began them, convinced that the church provided greater hope for culture and society than did the state.15 On ecclesiology, however, Hodge’s thinking bore significant tensions which came out clearly in his polemics with James Henley Thornwell (1812–1862), Hodge’s only equal as a Presbyterian theologian and the preeminent voice in the Southern wing of the church. The two treated their dispute as principial, but their differing contexts certainly determined much of the issue. Thornwell was a South Carolinian to the marrow.16 There he had been born (to a plantation overseer). There he was educated; served two pastorates; became a college professor,

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

325

chaplain, and president; and helped found the Presbyterians’ Columbia Theological Seminary. His personal style – proud, dogmatic, and polemical – mirrored the perennial style of Carolina’s political leadership, just as his political philosophy – that a republic could avoid “democratic radicalism” only if led by elite tribunes, elected by but independent of the people – echoed historic Carolina practice. Thornwell’s adamant ecclesiology thus could hardly help but run afoul of Hodge’s moderate sort as the politics of slavery deepened sectional tensions in the 1850s. Yet Thornwell was caught, along with Hodge, in the paradox of making organic claims on behalf of the church’s institutional strength and stability while simultaneously advancing individualistic notions of how a person came to join it. Both men could thus complain about “atomism” in society and “social-contract” delusions in state while still regarding the church as the sum total of its voluntary adherents whose rights had to be scrupulously guarded. Thornwell deemed the Bible to be as clear and binding on polity as on doctrine, and so treated minor points as entailing major principles that churches had to follow. He also took as literal a reading and as strict a construction of Scripture as South Carolina’s civil tribune, Senator John Calhoun, did of the U.S. Constitution: what the text propounded was always enjoined, and what it did not expressly permit was forbidden. Accordingly, Thornwell insisted that lay elders had parity of authority with clergy in church governance (making them a sort of ecclesiastical tribune), and that the church conduct all its affairs through duly prescribed and elected assemblies, not via administrative boards. If Thornwell proscribed such agencies from the Presbyterian Church, even less did he countenance the omnipresent parachurch organizations of antebellum America that were dispensing moral, educational, and humanitarian services in the name of Christ. With some reason Thornwell suspected these agencies as the mighty arm of Yankee social reform threatening Southern ways, slavery included. Thornwell could make this move, however, only by propounding a rigorous two-spheres doctrine of “the spirituality of the church,” which restricted church discipline to personal behaviors while defining such practices as slavery as purely civil matters.17 “Spiritual” as the church was to be, however, Thornwell preached the legitimacy of South Carolina’s secession from the Union in 1860, just as the Southern Presbyterian Church broke off from the nationwide denomination and gave its official blessing to the Confederate cause.18 Thornwell’s leadership was as important in the church as Calhoun’s was in the state for defending Southern rights and defining a distinctive Southern way of life. Still, Thornwell was committed enough to his principles to measure Southern slavery by biblical standards and there to find it wanting. He called for recognition of slave marriages, promotion of slave literacy, and punishment of cruel masters. He seemed to anticipate a gradual emancipation, believing that this ought to be matched by the gradual reduction of white labor to servile status. As Thornwell saw it, a Christian republic could survive only if the hazards and commodification of human labor that obtained under a free-market, free-labor system were replaced by the natural, and transracial, protective hierarchies that God had ordained. The only alternative, he

326

JAMES D. BRATT

asserted, was an atheistic state characterized by democratic tyranny.19 Neither option in fact eventuated, but Thornwell’s influence helped institute a critical conservative vision that persisted in the South for the next hundred years. Leadership back at Princeton took on something of a Southern tone itself in passing to Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851–1921) after Hodge’s death. Heir to a Kentucky clan torn between Confederate military leadership and proUnion churchmanship, Warfield shied away from the politics of church or state to devote himself to the sort of professionalism that increasingly marked American academia in the last third of the century. He also figuratively leaped back over Hodge to reiterate some of Archibald Alexander’s original themes, in particular the authority and veracity of Scripture. Warfield’s 1881 article on “Inspiration,” written in collaboration with A. A. Hodge, defined the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that became a hallmark of Protestant fundamentalism over the next century. At the same time Warfield’s two-volume critique of Perfectionism disparaged some of the core ethical and spiritual emphases that would mark that movement on its Holiness side.20 To Warfield the psychology of Augustine and theology of Calvin remained perfectly appropriate to the modern world, so he set his pen to demonstrating the continuity between the two and their corrective to the pretensions of earnest evangelicals as well as naturalistic modernizers on the American religious scene. Warfield thus plumbed the patristic and Reformation roots of the Westminster documents more deeply than had his Princeton predecessors. He also identified faith more closely with doctrinal formulations. For him religious experience, conscience, and nature were “all but superseded” by Scripture (hence his fixation on its inerrancy), and piety amounted to feeling the scriptural facts religiously.21 If this approach betokened his determination to face head on the growing challenges to religion from science, Warfield’s ability to reconcile biblical accounts of creation with evolutionary theory in biology indicates that for him science was not – could not be – in fundamental conflict with Christianity. Nor was Warfield countering his teacher Charles Hodge at this point. Hodge’s famous quarrel with Darwinism has obscured his midcentury reconciliation of Princeton theology with the new geology; similarly, Warfield harmonized Scripture, properly understood, with non-Darwinian concepts of evolution, keeping alive Princeton’s confidence that theology truly was a science.22

Lutheran Confessionalism Strong as they were, Princeton Presbyterianism’s confessional commitments were probably surpassed on the American scene by those of the Lutheran Church– Missouri Synod. This was not surprising, for the LCMS was a child of the movement for confessional restoration that had sprung up in Germany in the post-Napoleonic years and was carried to the United States in the mass migrations that began in the 1840s. Though hailing from disparate German territories and

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

327

scattered across the American Midwest, various local leaders of “old Lutheran” bent developed a communications network that led in 1847 to a formal denominational affiliation. The leader in this process and in the church’s first forty years of existence was Carl F. W. Walther (1811–1887). From the editor’s desk of its journals and the theology podium of its Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Walther steeped the LCMS in a Lutheran confessional consciousness that defined its identity and every venture.23 Those ventures amounted to a massive recruiting campaign among new immigrants which would help make conservative confessionalism much stronger in American than in German Lutheranism; by 1950, half of all American Lutherans were within old-Lutheran-shaped bodies, and that in spite – or because – of the LCMS’ adversarial identity.24 Walther found its enemies everywhere: rationalists and Romanists, Freemasons and sectarians, Methodists and Baptists, full-fledged Calvinists, and halfhearted Lutherans. Nor did he first arrive at this posture in America, for Walther, with many others, had his teeth set on edge already during his formative years in Germany. There, as he often summarized it, the “desiccated rationalism” of the Enlightenment had ruined much of Christendom, the experiential piety of the Restoration revéil proved too evanescent to correct it, and the Christian promise of the restored political regime went awry in the forced Lutheran-Reformed unionism of Prussian King Frederick William III. Amidst his youthful confusion, Walther fell under the spell of the charismatic Martin Stephan, who, as a self-appointed “bishop,” led an emigration of “true” Lutherans, Walther among them, to Missouri in 1839, only to fall into sexual and financial malfeasance. Now only one beacon could save Walther and the stranded pilgrims: God “did not allow a childlike trust in our precious Lutheran Fathers and an unconditioned adherence to the Lutheran Church and its doctrine to be extinguished in me.”25 That is, for Walther and his colleagues who suffered traumas whether old world or new, as for the myriad laity whom they gathered into their church, the Lutheran confessions, unaltered and uncompromised, formed the very lifeline to God, the rock of personal faith, the objective standard of orthodoxy, the bounds of the true visible church, and the weapons to turn against every foe. Let us take up these functions in reverse order. It is significant that Walther vaulted to leadership among Stephan’s scattered flock by proving their warrant as a genuine church via public debate. Polemical exchange would also describe much of his subsequent editorial career in warranting the Missouri Synod above other Lutheran contenders. These disputations always took the same form: the assertion of a thesis, the support of same from Scripture, corroboratory citations from the Lutheran Confessions, then pages of argumentation for every nuance and detail of his position from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran writers. Walther helped his case by compiling an enlarged edition of W. C. Baier’s Compendium to fill the lack of a good Lutheran dogmatics text in the States.26 His argumentation was not distinguished by its originality, nor did he wish it to be; Walther thought he was simply recomposing or repositioning pieces of the established truth. More, Walther

328

JAMES D. BRATT

argued that its correct confessional orientation distinguished the LCMS as the only true visible church of Christ on earth. He was quick to add that true Christians existed in every communion – the “invisible church” – but the LCMS alone as an institution was marked by the fully faithful preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments. That full faithfulness obtained by virtue of its unswerving loyalty to the Lutheran Confessions, which were the best distillation and arrangement of the truth behind and within the Word and sacraments. At this point Walther’s critics – and Walther himself – might raise objections. Is not Christ the essence of the Church? Is not Scripture prior to Confession? Walther always replied, “Yes.” Salvation lay only in the work and promise of Christ, but Christ, upon his ascension, had left his followers Word and sacrament; these pointed reliably to Christ’s work and promise only if rightly taught and understood; such understanding required the correct apprehension available only in the Confessions. Thus, while Walther gave significant attention to arguing for scriptural inerrancy, he could also describe Scripture as being full of apparent contradictions that could be reconciled only when the Word was properly divided between Law and Gospel, the “two entirely different doctrines that it contains.”27 Since only the Lutheran Confessions accomplish that task, Walther continued, Scripture in the sense of human understanding depended upon confessional interpretation; likewise, justification in a sense depended upon the proper understanding of justification. That understanding came to full and explicit measure only in the Lutheran Confessions, where justification stood forth clearly in itself and in relation to all other doctrine; but these Confessions were upheld consistently and adamantly only in the LCMS. Those genuine Christians living outside its fold therefore ought, as they valued their salvation, to flee to its shelter as quickly as possible. It is safe to say that such formal theological claims would satisfy Missouri’s rank and file only for so long. Their enduring allegiance was secured at two other sites. First, Walther as a pastor and teacher of pastors had a marvelous ability to bring Lutheran objectivity home to subjective need, to apply Luther’s teachings in the existential pinch. Secondly, the understanding of salvation he brought back from the seventeenth century stood in clear and refreshing contrast to that of the standard evangelicalism regnant in the American nineteenth century. The excessive emotionalism, chronic introspection, functional subjectivity, strenuous selfdiscipline, and behavioral strictures that revivalism entailed might appeal to souls constricted by stolid traditionalism, but they could quickly become constrictive themselves, and alien too for newly arrived immigrants despised by their nativeborn neighbors as “German boors.” To such, Lutheran confessionalism supplied an esteemed heritage on earth along with a heavenly salvation objectively accomplished, once-for-all apprehended, and behaviorally generous. The lesson was passed along to the next generation via Christenlehre, a saturated catechesis that culminated in the children’s demonstration of their learning before the entire congregation. Thus, in the LCMS both the substance and status of confessional orthodoxy were unmistakable.28

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

329

Walther’s literalism, dogmatism, and love for polemics were an exaggerated version of the mentality that Missouri shared with Princeton. Their very similarity, of course, kept them apart since the two schools were tenacious for different confessions. Nor did the LCMS get much closer to potential collaborators within the American Lutheran house, a group from longer-established Eastern precincts who also wished to renew the confessional heritage. Emerging at much the same time that the Saxons were arriving in Missouri, these confessionalists created their own affiliation as the General Council in 1867 under the superintendency of Charles Porterfield Krauth. The Council’s very different setting and experience no doubt accounted for much of its divide from Missouri, but Krauth’s “yes” and Walther’s “no” to a historical-symbolist understanding of doctrine precluded any bridge from crossing the gap. Charles Porterfield Krauth (1823–1883) grew up in American Lutheranism’s Pennsylvania heartland, in fact, at its college and seminary at Gettysburg, where his father taught theology. By the time Krauth himself undertook seminary studies there, proposals to assimilate Lutheranism to the prevailing evangelical enterprise were gaining momentum, especially at the hand of Gettysburg Seminary’s Samuel S. Schmucker. Under that impetus Krauth launched himself into revival campaigns at his first pastorate, only to tire quickly of the exercise; at the same time he came into some rationalistic doubts about the faith. The young pastor turned to classic Lutheran authors as an antidote to both problems. While his reading program turned out to be lifelong, his immediate work, in the late 1840s, went into a campaign to renew confessional consciousness in American Lutheranism at large. This campaign became a war in 1855, when Schmucker proposed a “Definite Synodical Program” to revise the Augsburg Confession so heavily that “virtually all the characteristically Lutheran affirmations [would be] exchanged for those of American New School Protestantism.” The war eventuated in the separation of the confessionalist General Council from the more generic General Synod in 1867. Krauth led the former as editor of its paper and theologian at its seminary in Philadelphia.29 This was an ironic outcome since Krauth’s whole intent for confessional renewal was conciliation. In his reading Krauth had absorbed the dialectical historical sense rife in the German scholarship of his day, and he applied it to his own situation to make American Lutheranism a grand mediator indeed. First, Lutheranism was to mediate between reactionary Rome and radical Protestant sects, to which the Reformed were also inclined. Second, America was the ground upon which freedom and order – the antithetical forces of the West, and also of the Reformation – would be reconciled. Third, among systems of doctrine, the Augsburg Confession was superior, being a comprehensive whole that was deep but accessible, precise but irenic. Enclosing the full compass of the faith, it was a guiding compass as well, overcoming evangelicalism’s theological partiality, fragmentation, or utter ignorance. Finally, within Christian experience the Lord’s Supper was the crucial point where time met eternity, human met divine, and spiritual became corporeal; among doctrines of the sacrament, the Lutheran

330

JAMES D. BRATT

served best by keeping the Real Presence – unlike the Puritan-evangelical Zwinglian truncation – without the magical mystifications of Rome.30 All these virtues stood to be lost, Krauth argued, if the confessional minimalists in the American Lutheran churches prevailed. The ecumenical unity Schmucker promised was specious, an organizational consolidation quite typical of American evangelical projects but lacking the inner life which alone could make any project last. Nor was the confessional heritage the petty, arbitrary obstacle to cooperation that the minimalists accused it of being, Krauth argued. Rather, it was the link of present to past, the incorporation of living believers with the departed faithful, which was a vital ecumenical unity in itself. It provided anchorage amid the winds of change and a taproot to the faith of all ages. Krauth’s ecclesiology was the opposite of the evangelical revivalist and Presbyterian voluntarist models around him. Individuals did not make the church anew by joining it; rather, the everlasting church gathered and sustained the individuals that came within the bounds of its word and sacraments. Understandably, Krauth had to scramble at this point to differentiate his stance from that of Rome, in which effort a Romantic ontology rendered good service. It was not the institution itself but the spirit it housed that gave it life; yet, contrary to American evangelical notions, that spirit could not hover about disembodied but had to be incarnated, much as the divine had to come to earth in the person of Christ. So also with the Confessions: Krauth honored their letter without feeling fixed upon it in the manner of Walther. The Confessions were the living, indispensable connection between the present believer and the everlasting truth, but that truth predated Luther and the Reformation; it was present, so to speak, in, under, and around the literal text more than being identified with it. Confessional texts had to be honored not just as historical monuments, although they were not less than that, and they constituted irreplaceable guideposts to proper understanding. But ultimately they were the flesh within which the animating spirit of truth dwelled, and so should not be chopped apart à la Schmucker or idolized à la Walther.31

The Mercersburg Theology Krauth hoped this renewed confessionalism would win Western immigrant support for his Eastern battles. Ironically, he won more respect among the Reformed instead. Charles Hodge acknowledged Krauth’s acumen on Reformation topics and hosted him cordially at Princeton. A more substantive convergence occurred with John Williamson Nevin (1803–1886), once Hodge’s protégé but by midcentury his foe owing to the historical-symbolist approach which Nevin adopted and vigorously promoted across the theological board. The dispute between the two was irreconcilable because Nevin was working out a change in philosophical premises diametrically at odds with Hodge’s Scottish Common Sense. On the other hand, he inspired Krauth and others who were searching for a path out of evangelicalism’s wilderness; in fact, much of Krauth’s vocabulary about confessions,

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

331

church history, and the American religious scene came directly from Nevin’s writing. That Nevin was also moving from his native Presbyterianism into the German Reformed Church, specifically to a teaching post at its seminary in Mercersburg, indicates the larger cultural tide at work: for the next century, American theology would follow German pacesetters.32 From Friedrich Rauch, his colleague at Mercersburg, Nevin absorbed a Hegelian psychology that treated the individual as part of transpersonal spiritual identity. From reading J. A. Neander, Nevin caught the German historicist approach that constituted for him “an actual awakening of the soul,” virtually a second conversion.33 Prior to these steps he had adopted an intuitional epistemology. With these three, his Romantic-Idealist equipment was complete and the empiricist-atomistic mind-set of Scottish Common Sense was put to rout. Rout, at any rate, was what Nevin hoped to accomplish in revenge upon his own weary way through the evangelical maze. Nevin’s youth had followed an unexceptional pattern, from Pennsylvania Presbyterianism to conversion at college to seminary training at Princeton to revival-and-reform activism in his first theological professorship at Pittsburgh. But the exhibitions of a Finneyite revivalist there followed by the 1837 split in the Presbyterian Church shocked and dismayed him. Moreover, the tools honed in his training with Hodge seemed ineffectual against the first and complicit in the second. The German approach offered a deeper, keener critique. The two sides in the church schism, it occurred to Nevin, and the two in the revival controversy suffered the same defects. Both began and ended with individuals; both regarded the church as voluntary associations of believers; both apprehended a distant Jesus who, whether temporarily snared by artifice (revival) or fixed by reason (Princeton), still remained an abstract fund of forgiveness in a distant calculus of justification.34 In this complex Nevin saw three problems: a lack of genuine personal holiness, an increasing desperation to make conversion convincing, and, in consequence, a disparagement of the institutional church. Nevin’s solution came as a unit as well: to see the church as Christ’s continuing presence on earth; to see the incarnation – Christ’s personal entry into history – as the key event of his story and of all history; and to find in the sacraments those means of continuing union with Christ that would secure believers in genuine holiness and incorporate them in the new order into which God was redeeming all creation. Without discarding the elements of the reigning evangelical scheme, Nevin changed all the priorities: Christology before divine decree, ecclesiology before human agency, creation before atonement, sacrament before conversion, Bethlehem before Calvary, Kingdom before millennium. His burden was to have to warrant the exchange before a dubious audience that charged him alternately with Romanism, mysticism, and liberalism. Hodge himself brought all three charges, although the first and third might seem to cancel each other out. Nevin’s response came out of the most detailed, knowledgeable historical-theological research that had been conducted in America to date. Nevin began with the Reformation, demonstrating how much of its heritage – even within the Reformed stream – had been lost to “Puritan” and Princetonian

332

JAMES D. BRATT

reductions. Hodge did not soon forget Nevin’s exposure of his ignorance regarding Calvin’s concept of the Lord’s Supper.35 But Nevin did not stop with his former teacher or with their shared Genevan starting point. He delved deeply into patristic writers and practices to try to settle questions of polity and liturgy as well as doctrine. His conclusions brought him to the verge of Rome; at the end he demurred, although he did agree with John Henry Newman that the Puseyite Anglican position was an untenable halfway house and not a permanent residence. The German Reformed was as authentic a stop as any, he concluded, for it was built on the Reformed catholicity of Calvin and stood a fair chance of someday being the mediator that would bring together Lutheran and Reformed, then, perhaps, Protestant and Catholic.36 To that end the Heidelberg Catechism provided a promising confessional basis while simultaneously providing the best antidote to revivalism by inculcating the apostolic faith in the hearts and minds of the denomination’s children. Church (contrary to Horace Bushnell, not chiefly home) nurture would continue with the weekly liturgy of Word and sacrament, by which, following Calvin, believers would achieve genuine union with Christ. Thus united, the church would overcome that casual sectarian splintering which Nevin labeled as no less than the Antichrist.37 Nevin certainly saw doctrine developing over the course of church history and sensed some dialectic in its pattern of development. But his chief concern was to fathom the theological materials lying forgotten in the past and leverage them against the partialities of the present. His colleague Philip Schaff (1819–1893) attended more to historical pattern and details in their own right, though still to the ends of church unity and better theological comprehension. Ironically, history itself would bear Schaff far from the positions he held in 1844, when he first arrived at Mercersburg fresh from a sterling German education and into the welcoming arms of Nevin.38 Schaff was virtually ordained by experience to see the pattern of change as a reconciliation of contraries. Born into a Reformed family in German Switzerland, he became immersed in not only the various pietist circles, but also the discordant theological milieux, of Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, where he took his successive educational degrees. He arrived in America at the peak of anti-Catholic rioting in east coast cities, and promptly gave an inaugural address at Mercersburg that emphasized the Reformation’s roots in the Catholic past. Contrary to Nevin, however, the longer Schaff lived amid American Protestantism the more he liked it. At the start he thought it fell quite below the German standard, but over time he reversed the charges and began recommending American spirit and practice for Germans’ edification. He finished his life the scholar-statesman of an emerging American Protestant mainline, realizing some of Nevin’s ecumenical dream. But this happened only after Schaff had quit the German Reformed for the Presbyterian Church, and Mercersburg for the erstwhile pro-revival, New Schooldescended Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He even resuscitated the Evangelical Alliance (1867), which had originated in 1846 as Samuel Schmucker’s pan-Protestant, anti-Catholic united front.

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

333

In all these peregrinations, however, Schaff was loyal to the Hegelian dialectics he had absorbed from his German teachers F. C. Baur, F. A. Tholuck, and J. A. Neander. He arrived at Mercersburg with the standard model of church history that identified a Petrine thesis in Roman Catholicism that had been countered by a Pauline antithesis in the Reformation and awaited a Johannine synthesis of the two. The young Schaff thus relativized Protestantism, to the deep chagrin of one wing of the German Reformed Church; the chagrin deepened when his opponents brought him up on heresy charges only to show that they knew little, and he a great deal, of the church’s confessional documents.39 Remarkably, after this experience Schaff did not resolutely set his face toward a High Church harbor but began to sense America as the place where key antinomies – between freedom and order, vitality and stability, innovation and tradition – might be resolved into a third way full of creative power. American Christianity, that is, might solve Christendom’s old problems. He took his mission to be supplying the side that his adopted land lacked: the sense of tradition, the theological ballast, the ecumenical respect. His method was twofold. First, his ecclesiastical statesmanship brought representatives of the leading Protestant bodies together on projects of common appeal like the New York Sabbath Committee and the American Revised Bible translation. Second, he harnessed his German training into producing some of the lasting monuments of American church historical scholarship: the History of the Christian Church (8 vols., 1858–1910), The Creeds of Christendom (3 vols., 1877), the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (3 vols., 1882–1884), and A Select Library of the Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers (14 vols., 1880–1886). His organizational monument still endures today in the American Society of Church History.

Conclusion Schaff ’s roles testify to the unexpected influence confessional theology had attained in the United States by the century’s end. He forged a Protestant coalition of considerable power, not by erasing tradition and historical differences as antebellum evangelicals had proposed, but precisely by evoking them. Yet the ahistoricist Warfield, Hodge, and Walther – and Schaff’s collaborator Nevin too – might well have wondered about the cost of this victory. The Princetonians’ and Missourian’s descendants would include some of the chief intellectuals in the Fundamentalist movement that faulted Schaff ’s mainline for evacuating historic confessions of their substance in the name of further adapting (as Schaff said the church always must) to the new conditions of the day. For his part, though Nevin would surely applaud the triumph of church over sect, he might have wondered if anyone remembered what he insisted the church existed for: to be the living body of Christ, bearing salvation from a transcendent, supernatural reality to a needy world. The new American world tended to view the church as needy, and mainline churches tended to read history as sheer progress, not dialectical agon. In any case, Nevin as

334

JAMES D. BRATT

much as his opponents would be surprised to see that Schaff ’s winning coalition joined German Mercersburg not only to Krauth’s wing of Lutheranism but also to a major stream from once-revivalist New School Presbyterianism and to the New England Congregationalism of Horace Bushnell. That is to say, Nevin and Krauth’s much-scorned “Puritanism” in both its revivalist and culture-religious forms supplied most of the troops for the ecclesiastical army of history and ecumenism which Schaff helped to marshal. The other New School stream, just as oddly, allied with the heirs of Princeton in hopes of linking born-again enthusiasm with rationalist dogma to battle immanent modernism.40 The national standing of the bodies that Schaff represented was all the more surprising given the waffling that confessionalists had evinced regarding the Civil War. Walther and much of Missouri had Confederate sympathies, despite their aversion to slavery, because their enemies – Yankee reformers and German ’48ers – supported the Union. Krauth’s Southern-born wife courted danger in displaying her sympathies in wartime Philadelphia, while Nevin spent the war in conversation with his neighbor, ex-President James Buchanan, no zealous prosecutor of Unionism! Schaff suffered the embarrassment of seeing his article calling for peace via a moratorium on discussions of slavery appear in the Mercersburg Review in April 1861, just as the shooting began.41 By war’s end, all of them were vigorously (Walther, mildly) supporting the Northern cause of unity and order. Therein lay their success, for there lay the American future – and also, perhaps, the real purpose of the war. Radical revivalists with their millennial reforms went to the margins; minds tuned to history; institutions and organic connections came to the center. As Emerson had promised a very different audience for very different ends, the historical confessionalists had stood firm and the wide world had swung around to meet them. The question remained whether the theological heritage they originally championed would survive the industrial-scientific “progress” that lay ahead, and whether the transcendent spirit that dwelt for them amidst text and history would be recognized in an obsessively immanent civilization.

Notes 1 “In 1740 America’s leading intellectuals were clergymen and thought about theology; in 1790 they were statesmen and thought about politics.” Edmund S. Morgan, “The American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement,” in The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, ed. Jack R. Greene (New York: 1968), 568. 2 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: 1989). 3 This pattern is ably surveyed in Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: 1972), chaps. 19, 25. It plays a central role in the structure and argument of the two recent and definitive syntheses in the field: Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: 2002), see

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11

12

335

especially chaps. 6, 12; and E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: 2003), the entire second section of which is entitled “The Baconian Style,” see especially chap. 8. The ramification of these premises through the most sophisticated debates of the era can be followed in Allen C. Guelzo, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, Conn.: 1989). The best study of mid-nineteenth-century American Protestant confessionalism specifically, but in international context, is Walter Conser, Jr., Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America, 1815–1866 (Mercer, Ga.: 1984). The regional context gets better emphasis in R. Bryan Bademan, “Contesting the Evangelical Age: Protestant Challenges to Religious Subjectivity in Antebellum America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2004). Darryl G. Hart incorporates it into his historiographical-theological argument about The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, Md.: 2002). Mark A. Noll, ed., The Princeton Theology, 1812–1921 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: 1983), 19. Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822 (Princeton, N.J.: 1989); and Fred J. Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783–1837 (University, Ala.: 1980). For the theological and ecclesiological positions of the more confessional “Old Side” Presbyterianism of the era, see Hart, The Lost Soul, 32–42. On Common Sense philosophy in general and its appeal in postrevolutionary context, see Noll, Princeton, 185–243; Noll, America’s God, 93–113, 253–268; Holifield, Theology in America, 173–196; and Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: 1976), 337–357. Respecting its place in Princeton Theology proper, see Noll, Princeton Theology, 30–33; and John W. Stewart, “Mediating the Center: Charles Hodge on American Science, Language, Literature, and Politics,” Studies in Reformed Theology and History 3, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 15–28. Noll, Princeton Theology, 13, 61–91. Noll, Princeton Theology, 13–14, 28–30, 37, 107–141; and Stewart, Mediating the Center, 11. Holifield, Theology in America, surveys Hodge’s several positions and contentions vis-à-vis contemporaries, 371–389. The various facets of his theology and career are given close examination by the essays in John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead, eds., Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work (Grand Rapids, Mich.: 2002). Noll, Princeton Theology, 27–30. The crucial and pervasive import of Scottish and Baconian thinking in Hodge’s work is unpacked in James Turner, “Charles Hodge in the Intellectual Weather of the Nineteenth Century,” in Moorhead and Stewart, Hodge Revisited, 50–54, 58–61; and Bruce Kuklick, “The Place of Charles Hodge in the History of Ideas in America,” in Moorhead and Stewart, Hodge Revisited, 69–76. Noll, Princeton Theology, 176–207. For context and further details, see Brian Gerrish, “Charles Hodge and the Europeans,” in Moorhead and Stewart, Hodge Revisited, 135–158. Noll, Princeton Theology, 155–164. See also Turner, “Hodge in the Intellectual Weather of the Nineteenth Century,” 51–59; and E. Brooks Holifield, “Hodge, the Seminary, and the American Theological Context,” in Moorhead and Stewart, Hodge Revisited, 115–123.

336

JAMES D. BRATT

13 David F. Wells, “Charles Hodge,” in Reformed Theology in America, ed. David F. Wells (Grand Rapids, Mich.: 1985), 39–59. See also Holifield, “Hodge, the Seminary, and the American Theological Context,” 107–111. 14 Noll, Princeton Theology, 176–184. 15 Stewart, Mediating the Center, 67–110; and Richard Carwardine, “The Politics of Charles Hodge,” in Moorhead and Stewart, Hodge Revisited, 247–298. See also Allen C. Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Antislavery Moment,” in Moorhead and Stewart, Hodge Revisited, 299–326. 16 The most comprehensive study of Thornwell is James O. Farmer, A Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Mercer, Ga.: 1986). For brief introductions, see Luder G. Whitlock, “James Henley Thornwell,” in Wells, Reformed Theology in America, 232–243; and Holifield, Theology in America, 389–394. 17 On Thornwell’s ecclesiology, see Whitlock, “Thornwell,” 233–237; and Farmer, Metaphysical Confederacy, 181–194, 256–260. 18 Farmer, Metaphysical Confederacy, 256–259, 276–281; and Noll, America’s God, 399–400, 420–421. 19 Eugene Genovese, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Culture War (Columbia, Mo.: 1995), 37–40. 20 Noll, Princeton Theology, 15–16, 280–298; and W. Andrew Hoffecker, “Benjamin B. Warfield,” in Wells, Reformed Theology in America, 60–86. 21 Noll, Princeton Theology, 241. 22 Noll, Princeton Theology, 142–144; Stewart, Mediating the Center, 15–49; and Ronald L. Numbers, “Charles Hodge and the Beauties and Deformities of Science,” in Moorhead and Stewart, Hodge Revisited, 77–102. 23 For LCMS history, see Walter Baepler, A Century of Grace: A History of the Missouri Synod, 1847–1947 (St. Louis, Mo.: 1947); Conser, Church and Confession, 15–68; and Mary Todd, Authority Vested: A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (Grand Rapids, Mich.: 2000). On Walther, see also Lewis W. Spitz, The Life of C. F. W. Walther (St. Louis, Mo.: 1961). On immigrant dynamics in particular, see Ralph D. Owen, “The Old Lutherans Come,” Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly 20 (April 1948): 4–26. 24 Statistic from Owen, “Old Lutherans,” 3. The biographical analysis in this paragraph is based on Spitz, Walther, 15–44; and Conser, Church and Confession, 6–10. 25 Quotation from Carl S. Meyer, ed., Letters of C. F. W. Walther: A Selection (Philadelphia: 1969), 33. 26 Robert D. Preuss, “Walther the Dogmatician,” in Carl F. W. Walther: The American Luther, ed. Arthur H. Drevlow et al. (Mankato, Minn.: 1987), 154–155. The substance of this and the following paragraph is based on Walther’s three seminal pieces, available in the abridged (of their copious confessional citations) English translation in “Church and Ministry” (originally 1852), “The Proper Form of an Evangelical Lutheran Congregation Liberated from the State” (1863), and “The Evangelical Lutheran Church the True Visible Church of God on Earth” (1866), all in William Dallmann et al., eds., Walther and the Church (St. Louis, Mo.: 1938). 27 C. F. W. Walther, God’s No and God’s Yes: The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel (St. Louis, Mo.: 1973 [1884–1885]), quotation 13; see also the twenty-five theses set forth at the start of the volume, 7–9.

AMERICA: CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGIES

337

28 A. R. Broemgel, “Walther the Preacher,” in Drevlow, American Luther, 135–147; and James D. Bratt, “Protestant Immigrants and the Protestant Mainstream,” in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna (Urbana, Ill.: 1998), 120–123. See also Hart, Lost Soul, 42–52. A fine close study of the religious-communal fabric thus woven is Carol K. Coburn, Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran community, 1848–1945 (Lawrence, Kans.: 1992). 29 Ahlstrom, Theology in America, 52–57, quotation on 55. For more detail on the Lutheran conflict, see David A. Gustafson, Lutherans in Crisis: The Question of Identity in the American Republic (Minneapolis, Minn.: 1993), 118–163. There has not been a biography of Krauth published since Adolph Spaeth, Charles Porterfield Krauth, 2 vols. (New York: 1898, 1909). 30 Arie J. Griffioen, “Charles Porterfield Krauth and the Synod of Maryland,” Lutheran Quarterly 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 277–291. Krauth’s own voice on these points is conveniently available in “The Conservative Reformation,” in Ahlstrom, Theology in America, 430–460. 31 E. Theodore Bachmann, “Walther, Schaff, and Krauth on Luther,” in Interpretations of Luther, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia, 1968), 205–207. For the KrauthSchmucker conflict, see Holifield, Theology in America, 402–412. 32 Spaeth, Krauth, 1:107–108, 1:118–136, 1:155–158. The best single-volume introduction to the Mercersburg Theology remains James H. Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg (Chicago: 1961). Nevin in particular is studied in his various aspects in Sam Hamstra and Arie J. Griffioen, eds., Reformed Confessionalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Lanham, Md.: 1995). Richard E. Wentz provides a national-cultural biographical interpretation in John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian (New York: 1997). D. G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Philipsburg, N.J.: 2005), emphasizes his persistent commitments to Reformed theology. 33 Nevin quoted in Hamstra and Griffioen, Reformed Confessionalism, 70. 34 This paragraph and the next follow Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology, chaps. 1–3; and Robert Clemmer, “Historical Transcendentalism in New England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 4 (October–December 1969): 583–589. See also Holifield, Theology in America, 467–481. 35 Brian A. Gerrish, “The Flesh of the Son of Man: John W. Nevin on the Church and the Eucharist,” in Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: 1978). 36 Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology, 194–216. 37 John W. Nevin, History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism (Chambersburg, Pa.: 1847); John W. Nevin, The Anxious Bench (Chambersburg, Pa.: 1844); John W. Nevin, The Mystical Presence (Philadelphia: 1846); and John W. Nevin, Anti-Christ or the Spirit of Sect and Schism (New York: 1848). 38 Schaff ’s early years at Mercersburg are covered in Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology, 169–185. Stephen R. Graham, Cosmos in the Chaos: Philip Schaff ’s Interpretation of Nineteenth-Century American Religion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: 1995), ties this phase to his later development. 39 Ahlstrom, Religious History, 2:56–58. More detail on Schaff as church historian is available in Klaus Penzel, ed., Philip Schaff, Historian and Ambassador of the Universal Church: Selected Writings (Mercer, Ga.: 1991).

338

JAMES D. BRATT

40 George M. Marsden traces these dynamics in “The New School Heritage and Presbyterian Fundamentalism,” Westminster Theological Journal 23 (May 1970): 129–147; and more broadly in George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: 1980), 11–39. 41 See Spitz, Walther, 106–107; Spaeth, Krauth, 2:73; and on Nevin, Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology, 221–223. Schaff ’s article was “Slavery and the Bible,” Mercersburg Review 13, no. 2 (April 1861): 288–317; and see further Noll, America’s God, 411–412, 418–419.

Bibliography Conser, Walter, Jr. Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America, 1815–1866. Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984. Farmer, James O. A Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values. Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986. Gustafson, David A. Lutherans in Crisis: The Question of Identity in the American Republic. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993. Hamstra, Sam, and Arie J. Griffioen (eds.). Reformed Confessionalism in Nineteenth-Century America. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Holifield, E. Brooks. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Nichols, James H. Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Noll, Mark A. (ed.). The Princeton Theology, 1812–1921: Scripture, Science, and Theological Method from Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001. Stewart, John W., and James H. Moorhead (eds.). Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002.

CHAPTER 16

America: Transcendentalism to Social Gospel Robert W. Jenson

Theologians to be discussed in this chapter span the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, a period that in American history encompassed extraordinary events peculiar to the nation, and a correspondingly specific religious and theological ferment. The Civil War at the center of the period was, like all civil wars, fought between brothers, but was also one of the first great modern wars; the combination made it America’s defining catastrophe and catharsis, in theological connection fecund of schisms, heresies, and insights. Then followed the “Gilded Age,” the time of unregulated simultaneous territorial and industrial expansion – a combination unparalleled elsewhere – to which Christians reacted in ways stretching from encomia of wealth to the “Social Gospel.” The Civil War was bracketed by the two great periods of Continental and Irish immigration, which brought to the nation the confessional and sectarian theologies of the Continent, and Catholicism in strength. Nevertheless, the academic and literary theology that is discussed in volumes like this continued to be done mostly within the English-speaking Reformed tradition, with influence from German biblical criticism and Neo-Protestantism. What is traced in the following is therefore a track of theological history that only occasionally intersected with the tracks on which much of the American church’s actual life in this period ran; and readers should be aware of this. We are to consider “mediating” theologians. Until the Civil War, American theologians of the sort usually so labeled saw themselves situated between the more enthusiastic followers of Enlightenment and intact Puritanism. The latter comprised those who remained reasonably faithful to Calvinist “federal” theology, and followers of Jonathan Edwards who developed some parts of his thought1 into “the New England theology.” As it happens, we must start and spend much time with a dominant figure who was anything but a mediating theologian. We must begin with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) of Boston and Concord, because his thought constituted a specifically American extreme to be mediated,

340

ROBERT W. JENSON

because some of his followers did not notice this and regarded themselves as the mediators, and because one must understand him if one is to understand any nineteenth-century American religious thinking.

Transcendentalism We can begin with a clear date: in 1836 Emerson published “Nature,”2 in which he first presented – if somewhat obscurely – his religious vision to the public; and he with six others founded the Transcendentalist Club. Emerson himself said “transcendentalism” was simply a local word for idealism, adapted from Immanuel Kant’s terminology. There are, he said, but two ways of being in the world: there are materialists, who find the truth in the world delivered to their senses; and there are idealists, who find the world in the truth born from their own creatively rational souls.3 A simple identification of transcendentalism with idealism would, however, be misleading. The mixture of American exceptionalism, Kantianism, and Romanticism that Emerson created differed decisively from the syntheses of the German or English idealists. Transcendentalism emerged within an established theological liberalism – in the broader sense – of the New England mercantile seaboard. It is sometimes not appreciated that the Enlightenment did not need to be imported into colonial America, but was native to a transatlantic intellectual culture. Thus the sort of religious opinion represented in England by followers of John Locke and then in Germany by the Neologen was homegrown in New England and among the Virginia gentry from the early eighteenth century on, with greatest intellectual seriousness at Harvard and among clergy in the Boston area. Like “Enlightened” Christianity elsewhere, the movement was the religious expression of an increasingly distinct and self-confident bourgeoisie. The pattern of its critique of inherited Christianity was also everywhere much the same: precisely the most specific affirmations of Christianity – God’s finally decisive sole agency in salvation, the classical doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, and the understanding of the church as a particular sacramental society – were softened to accommodate a supposed general standard of what reasonable persons4 could think. When Jonathan Edwards worried about “Arminianism,”5 he had English almost-deists and certain Boston pastors equally in mind. In the eighteenth century, New England and Middle Colonies adherents of culturally accommodated teaching and practice, who abhorred the revivals and strict Calvinism equally, had called themselves the “broad and catholick party.” As differences grew in the first decades of the nineteenth century a new label for the tendency came into use, “Unitarian”; this designation also is now likely to be misleading. The Unitarian teachers and clergy were above all optimists about human free will and moral capacity, and rejected any doctrine of grace which seemed

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

341

to denigrate these. In most other doctrines they were simply disinclined to strict definition. In the doctrine of God most were not literally Unitarians; they maintained that only the Father is strictly speaking God but invoked the Son and the Spirit as his religiously functional manifestations, while leaving their metaphysical status vague.6 Traditional Reformed pastors and teachers, those radicalized by Jonathan Edwards, and the Unitarians endured together in one increasingly conflicted communion until in 1822 the “Baltimore Sermon” of William Ellery Channing laid out Unitarian negations with such clarity as to make it unavoidable that orthodox Reformed Christianity and Unitarianism were in fact two incompatible religious systems. It was then only a few years until specifically Unitarian associations of congregations and pastors were organized.7 Of the seven original members of the Transcendentalist Club, six were Unitarian ministers. A variety of factors set these particular Unitarians apart from their fellows. Some were personally restless in spirit, seeking more adventurous religion than famously pedestrian Unitarianism could provide. Orestes Brownson, perhaps the most brilliant of the original seven, had been successively a Presbyterian, a Universalist,8 a proselytizing atheist, and a Unitarian minister, and would be led by the Romantic element in Transcendentalism into the Roman Catholic Church, where he became a considerable annoyance to the hierarchy. Most were deeply influenced by European thinkers: Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Samuel Taylor Coleridge must especially be mentioned. But most decisive for the emergence of Transcendentalism was radical theological appropriation of a widely felt sense of limitless new human possibility in America: of an inexhaustible new continent and of release from the weight of past history, which had after all been played out elsewhere. We may hear Emerson himself: “Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce [are but] so many … ornaments” of thought. “I will not make more account of them…. I can find … the genius and creative principle of each and all eras, in my own mind.”9 “Before the immense possibilities of man … all past biography … shrinks away.”10 Bluntly, “The old is for slaves.”11 Attending to the sins of his own vocation, Emerson proclaimed in a famous lecture that the specifically American intellectual would be characterized precisely by distrust of his own work, with its attention to the utterances of dead men preserved in books and its commitment to the writing of more such traps for the spirit, insisting on finding wisdom each day afresh in himself.12 In 1838, in an address to Harvard’s graduating divinity students, Emerson laid out his specifically theological principles in atypically orderly fashion. Following an opening set-piece on the beauty of nature in spring, he moves to his theme: “[But] a more secret, sweet and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.”13 From this point on, this “sentiment of virtue” is the center of the discourse. “[Man] ought. He knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails to render account of it…. The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in [its] presence.”14 “The intuition of the

342

ROBERT W. JENSON

moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul…. They are out of time … and not subject to circumstance.”15 The sentiment of virtue is the individual’s rapture by a timeless moral law that appears unbidden from his own deepest self. At the next step Emerson declares that this sentiment of virtue “is the essence of all religion.”16 Romantic tones now appear, for which he has prepared by the discourse about beauty and by invoking a “sentiment” of virtue instead of virtue itself. A sentiment blurs limits that virtue or law itself might be expected to maintain; as Emerson says elsewhere, in sentiment “[t]he walls are taken away.”17 In the grip of the sentiment of virtue, man,18 according to Emerson, experiences nothing less than “that his being is without bound.”19 This proclamation is what Emerson has been aiming at all along. His argument is driven by a passion for limitless self-assertion: the religious sentiment “is divine and deifying…. It makes [a man] illimitable.”20 Insofar as a man gives himself to it, “he is God.”21 Clearly, such an evaluation of religious experience mandates resolute denial of some usual Christian suppositions. For if I am illimitable no other person can be decisive for my life, even if it be the Christ. and community must be of limited benefit or an actual hindrance, even if it is the church – according to Emerson, “to meet” with one another individuals must “descend” from their “native nobleness.”22 At times, Emerson praises “conversation” in a way that might have led to other lines of reflection: “In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party.” But then he retrieves the position: this “reference” is to “a common nature” that “is not social; it is impersonal; it is God.”23 Indeed, if I am boundless, there can finally be no other than me; I must be at bottom identical with all reality – and so with you and you with me and so on.24 Thus true religious sentiment “corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to … derive advantages from another, by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason.”25 Even within orthodoxy so minimal as that of Unitarianism, Christ and God had of course been grasped precisely as “another.” Emerson is fully aware of the break. It is the chief concern of his address, to convince his hearers26 that the doors to infinite self-expansion “stand open” before “every man” but are “guarded by one stern condition,” that the religious sentiment “cannot be received at second hand.” All that can be received from “another soul” is “provocation” to such sentiment.27 The most any other – including Jesus – can be for me is a “divine bard” who emits such provocations.28 So long as Jesus or other bards remain no more to me than that, they are “the friends of my virtue…. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting me to … subdue the world, and to Be. Thus, by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves, and thus only.”29 But the moment I rely on such a bard in his own person, so soon as he intrudes as an actual other, he becomes the enemy of my innate infinity.

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

343

If the individual’s experience of his own infinity weakens or is impeded, true religion falls. “Historical Christianity” has been fallen in this way since Paul. The chief symptom is the appearance of Christology itself, of the notion that Jesus is in any ontological way unique. Emerson explains the rise of Christology: “because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of ” by even fallen religionists, “the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to the rest.”30 Here longer quotation is necessary, to show the structure and animus of Emerson’s thinking: Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul…. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me….,” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer…! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven….,” Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before.31

There is real rancor here: “Historical Christianity … dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The [world] soul knows no [special] persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe.”32 Unmistakably, this theology derives its conceptuality, if definitely not its content, from Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and a mélange of idealists. What is not always noticed is that despite the Romantic or Idealist diction, the bedrock is Kant, and Kant precisely as “the perfecter of Enlightenment”; one could indeed be tempted to regard the Romanticism as mere “ornament.” The Enlightenment had decried attachment to particular persons or communities, and to tradition which mediates such attachments,33 for the sake of supposedly universal and timeless rationality and morality. In reaction against this, Romanticism was in part an attempt to recover the importance of historical particularity and tradition. Emerson, to the precise contrary of Romanticism and in full agreement with the Enlightenment, saw the particular and tradition as the enemies of Reason that is “out of time.” When some nineteenth-century Neo-Protestantism allied itself with Romanticism, it was in an attempt to grasp again the unique role of Jesus. Emerson was determined that Jesus, like anyone else,34 be given no unique role. Yet the Romantic rhetoric does have a function, and a decisive one. Kant had taught that the “transcendental unity of apperception,” the unifying and so constituting focus of my experience, from which the moral law emerges unasked into consciousness, is precisely “transcendental,” a metaphysical-epistemological point located behind – so to speak – my field of possible apprehension. What is in me derives from it, but I cannot get back to it. Since for Kant God is similarly located, followers of Kant have always been tempted to identify God and this transcendental

344

ROBERT W. JENSON

focus of personal subjectivity. Kant himself blocks this by decreeing that this realm is permanently unavailable to us, so that whatever identities may or may not prevail there do not concern us. Emerson’s posit of sentiment as the way I am related to my transcendental origin, and his Romantic rhetoric generally, serves to break down Kant’s rigor. The transcendental realm opens after all to experience, in feeling and intuition, and luxuriating therein I need no longer distinguish my transcendental self from God – or indeed from anything or anyone else. What Emerson’s borrowings from Schleiermacher and idealism accomplish is to transmute Kant’s ascetic transcendentalism into a sort of Gnosticism. One may wonder how so hazy a thinker became an icon of American intellectual history, praised by subsequent and far better philosophers, quoted in pulpits of all denominations, and anthologized in high school and college textbooks for generations. Part of the answer is surely that many have revered Emerson for his role in a developing American culture,35 and have not taken what he actually said seriously. But a more decisive answer may be that Emerson first brought to full expression the American culture-religion,36 the default position to which American religionists will return if other influence fails. American Christians have heard in Emerson the fascinating tones of what they would believe were they not Christian, and insofar as they have indeed been Christian, have naturally tried for synthesis. “The American religion” has been described as demotic Gnosticism,37 the attribution to the multitude of that secret identity of inwardness with an antiworld deity which ancient Gnosticism reserved for the elect; and this religion has been traced from Emerson through the nation’s cultural history. Be that as it may, it is certainly the case that Emerson seems to spring eternal in the American breast.38 There were in this time American theological Romantics of a more regular sort. Their theological impact was for the most part in other churches than the culturally established English-speaking bodies. We have mentioned Orestes Brownson. He was a learned disciple of French Romantic writers, and within Catholicism a voluble opponent of the immigrant Catholicism which was coming to dominate and seemed little to appreciate those depths of Catholic experience that drew Brownson.39 He was also a proponent of democratic ideals, against authoritarian habits he feared were arriving with the immigrant clergy. A sometime protégé of Brownson, Isaac Hecker, likewise found Transcendentalism a road to Rome. As a Catholic, he became a priest and a friar, and played a role in American Catholicism more positive and lastingly influential than Brownson’s. He and others from his initial order – the Redemptorists – founded the Paulist order of priests to pursue a mission for the conversion of Protestants. The order endures, now with a more irenic mission. He anticipated and prepared what was to be called “Americanism,” the proposition that America with its freedoms is not inimical to Catholicism but rather provides its truly appropriate home.

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

345

Among German and Scandinavian immigrants, both the Reformed and Lutheran churches experienced “confessional revivals,” recoveries of tradition and particularity that were in great part of Romantic inspiration. The Reformed movement is still active as “the Mercersberg Theology.” In our period, it was carried principally by John Nevin, the title of whose most important work, The Mystical Presence,40 shows the direction of his thought; and by Philip Schaff, who came to this country with a full education in the German theology of the first half of the nineteenth century, and may perhaps be said to have achieved an orthodox appropriation of Schleiermacher.41 The Lutheran equivalent was centered at a seminary in Philadelphia that was created on purpose to be the headquarters of confessional revival. Its leading light was Charles Porterfield Krauth, who made recovery of an authentically “Lutheran” doctrine of – again – eucharistic Presence the center of his effort.42 Where many earlier immigrant leaders had deliberately furthered accommodation to antecedent American – that is, English-language Reformed – teaching and practice,43 the particularities of Lutheran or Continental Reformed tradition were now to be recovered. Liturgies were to be purified of American revivalist practices, and traditional or allegedly traditional orders and practices restored. The word catholic ceased in some contexts to be a pejorative and came instead to specify some of the movements’ central goals.

Neo-Protestantism “Neo-Protestantism” is a label for all that various nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theology that sought to rescue Christianity from the Enlightenment by following Friedrich Schleiermacher in his basic procedure, if usually in no more than that. One begins with an analysis of human existence, to discover a necessary place therein for “religion”; and continues by ascertaining the role of Christ in this religious life.44 Little more is common to Neo-Protestant theologians than the bare bones of this method; the initial analysis of our existence could be empirical, phenomenological, or speculative, and the role of Christ in religious existence could be anything from “personal savior,” to metaphysical reconciler, mythic representation of truth, or moral teacher. The term mediating theology often coincides with “Neo-Protestant”: these theologians found they could abandon neither the Enlightenment nor the tradition of the church’s faith, and set out to mediate the experienced conflict between them.45 Transcendentalism itself might be regarded as a Neo-Protestant movement, though its intent in the case of Emerson himself was very different from Schleiermacher’s. As earlier noted, Emerson was assuredly no mediating theologian, though many influenced by him were; these simply ignored Emerson’s antiChristology and appropriated his American exceptionalism and Romanticism. In nineteenth-century America, most more strictly so-called mediating or Neo-Protestant theology was the shadow of German developments, and need

346

ROBERT W. JENSON

not be reported here. But there was one profiled and original thinker in Schleiermacher’s general tradition: Horace Bushnell (1802–1876). Educated at Yale, he became in 1833 pastor at Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained for his active career. Bushnell was an idiosyncratic polymath: a pioneer city planner, an educational theorist, a public commentator on the development of American culture and civil society, and a lonely critic of the mechanistic political theory behind the American Constitution. He delivered acclaimed lectures at the American centers of learning but was never offered a permanent post, being – like Jonathan Edwards before him – regarded as too dangerous. His first major work appeared eleven years after Emerson’s “Nature”: Christian Nurture46 is a groundbreaking study of the relation between childhood and religion, which must still be required reading for any concerned with the question. According to Bushnell’s own account, Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection and Schleiermacher on the Trinity provided the basis of his mature theology. In proper Neo-Protestant fashion, Bushnell laid a foundation for theology by an analysis of human existence. He found the heart of human life in our involvement with language and in organically antecedent society.47 For him, these two aspects of human existence coincided;48 his insight into them was attained simultaneously, in the same experience that brought him back to Christianity.49 All language beyond the immediate naming of physical objects is, discovered Bushnell, metaphor: “[L]anguage built on physical images is … two stories high…. In one it is literal, naming so many roots, or facts of form; in the other it is figure, figure on figure clean beyond the dictionaries.”50 Metaphor is not deficient description but rather the appropriate expression of the truth appropriate to mind: “[M]atter-born words have all a second sense related to mind, a power of expression by figure that makes them God-given symbols of thought and spirit.”51 “The soul that is struggling to utter itself, flies to whatever signs … it can find in the visible world, calling them in to act as interpreters.”52 That the metaphors are “God-given” is a point decisive for Bushnell’s theology, to which we will return in a moment. Since our minds thus depend on metaphors drawn from the external world, and live to express themselves, “A pure … individual man, living wholly with and from himself, is a mere fiction,”53 Emerson was wrong from the start. The body, by which we are related to the world of objects, is “added to the soul to … play it forth into social understanding.”54 Individualism, toward which “all our modern notions and speculations have taken a bent,” is the great modern and especially American disaster.55 Indeed, Bushnell saw an almost insuperable problem at the root of America’s existence, and was not so thrilled as others by America’s exceptional situation: “[T]he society transplanted in a case of emigration cannot carry its roots with it; for society is a vital creature, having roots of antiquity which inhere in the very soil, in the spots consecrated by valor, by genius and religion. Transplanted to a new field, the migrant race loses, of necessity, a considerable portion of that

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

347

vital force which is the organific and conserving power of society … and nothing remains … but the two unimportant incidents, proximity and a common interest.”56 One could hardly more directly contradict much standard American political theory, then and now, than by calling proximity and common interest unimportant. A drastic example of Bushnell’s “organic” understanding of society is provided by his attitude to slavery and the Civil War. As a Northern Protestant, he of course regarded slavery as sin. More specific to his thinking was his attitude to the “Missouri Compromise,” by which slavery was given a foothold outside the original slaveholding colonies: it was, he said, “a national sin,” to which all were “conformed” and by which all were “contaminated.” Yet he distrusted ideological reform movements, and did not join the abolitionists. He was against the war, yet once it began saw it as the blood sacrifice which would on the one hand cleanse the nation of this organic sin and might on the other hand consecrate for the first time a truly national identity, in the fashion of Israel’s sacrifices at Sinai.57 When language rises above mere description to be the figural expression of mind, it does not detach itself from its origin, for “our single words were significant originally because the stamps of God’s intelligence were in their faces.”58 “[T]he whole universe of nature is a perfect analogon of the whole universe of thought or spirit.”59 This is most stringently true of historical fact, for it is “actual life … remote from all abstractions,” and therefore is in itself already figural, “for history is nothing but an … expression of God and man in their own nature and character.”60 Thus the metaphors are there waiting for us; we do not make them up, but reimagine what God has imagined before us:61 “Metaphor on metaphor crowds the earth and the skies, bearing each a fact that envisages the Eternal Mind, whose wording forth it is to be.”62 When we follow the chains of metaphors offered by nature and most directly by history, this is therefore simply “intelligence discovering intelligence, mind rethinking the thoughts of mind.”63 This analysis of human existence in place, the move to Christology and Trinitarian doctrine, could be immediate: “Nothing of Christ [is] so comprehensively adequate as to call him … God’s last metaphor!”64 The whole of Bushnell’s theology is commentary on this proposition. Bushnell’s closest approach to a systematic theological presentation was two very long lectures given in 1848 and published together the following year, with an introductory “Preliminary Dissertation on Language,”65 as God in Christ.66 One, on “The Divinity of Christ,” was delivered on relatively friendly turf at Yale; the other, on “The Atonement,” was delivered at Harvard just ten years after Emerson’s – and a more opposite viewpoint could hardly have been presented. It is the lecture on Christology and the Trinity in which both the mediating character of Bushnell’s theology and its originality are most apparent, and we will conclude with it. Bushnell rejects both the orthodox doctrine of Christ’s divinity, which asserts “a real and metaphysical triunity of persons in the divine nature,”67 and

348

ROBERT W. JENSON

Unitarian or Transcendentalist talk about Jesus as a wonderful being something less than divine, perhaps an Emersonian guru of perfected humanity. The orthodox, he says, must either teach a merely social unity of God – and so be in fact unorthodox – or resign themselves to incoherence.68 On the other hand, anything less than a full affirmation of Christ’s deity is religiously useless: “It is God that we want, to know Him, to be near Him, to have His feeling unbossomed to us.” The “superhuman” Christ of the Unitarians only mocks our finite and fallen state. “Let us have the divine … itself … God’s own beauty, truth and love.”69 The humanity of Christ poses no conceptual problem and by itself is no benefit; it is his deity we need, and need to think through. Situated between these rejections, Bushnell proposes to “let go” metaphysical speculations “and return to the simple Father, Son and Holy Ghost of the scriptures and the Apostolic Fathers;70 there to rest in the living and life-giving forms of the spirit.”71 The Trinity he affirms is “God in his revelation”; the three “persons … are the dramatis personae of revelation.”72 Bushnell’s intended Trinity is what is usually called the “economic”73 Trinity, and like Schleiermacher before him and many other theologians since, he hoped to avoid the difficulties of talk about an “immanent” Trinity. But the worry that hiddenly propels all Trinitarian thinking inevitably reappears: When we encounter God revealed in Christ, is it really “the divine … itself ” that we meet? Resting in the three, do we in fact have “God’s own” anything? What is the reality-status of the economic Father, Son, and Spirit? Also, Bushnell cannot quite “let go” of the question. His answer sets up both the problematic and the achievement of his doctrine: the “reality” of the Trinitarian personae “is measured by what of the infinite they convey in these finite forms.”74 A divine reality other than the three is thus, after all, posited “the infinite.”75 “[W]hat conception [can we] form of God as simply existing in Himself and as yet unrevealed? Only that He is the absolute Being … the I am that I am, giving no sign that He is, other than that He is.” “He dwells in eternal silence, without parts, above time.”76 Bushnell introduces this characterization of deity as if it were self-evident; but if we ask where in fact it came from, it is plain that he has simply assumed certain strands of Enlightenment theology. His discussion of Christology tries to mediate this supposed obvious truth and the truth of the Gospel. It is not that, like some others of his time, Bushnell is enamored of the merely Absolute. On the contrary, this conception of God, for all its intellectual necessity, is a “very unsatisfactory … unsignificant, and practically untrue representation of God.”77 The incarnation occurs precisely to rescue us from it. If we are to know God, “the One must appear in the manifold; the Absolute in the conditional.”78 God must “dramatize His immensity.”79 Indeed, it is exactly the dramatic interaction of finite representations of God, including dramatic dissonance and accompanying “formal contradictions,”80 by which they reveal the Infinite: “No one finite thing represents the Absolute Being; between two or more finite forces acting obliquely on our mind, it is driven out … towards the Infinite.”81

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

349

Fundamentally, as we have seen, all creation, all that is other than God, reveals him, is his “wording forth.” But it does this insofar as it is a great mutual play, cosmic and historical, of God’s metaphors for himself. And of that drama, Father, Son, and Spirit are the personae: “In these three persons or impersonations I … see a revelation of the Absolute Being, under just such relatives as by their mutual play, in and before our imaginative sense, will … render Him most conversable, bring Him closest to feeling, give Him the freest … access … to our hearts.”82 Yet is Bushnell even now really in position to say that Christ – with the Father and the Spirit – is God, as he set out to? Not if revelation itself is thought of as alien to God himself. Why after all would the infinite as so far described want “access to our hearts”? Thus, at the last minute, Bushnell is compelled after all to posit a differentiation in the Absolute Being, a something in him “without which He could never be revealed.” This is “a capacity of self-expression … a generative power of form, a creative imagination, in which … He can produce Himself outwardly, or represent Himself in the finite…. Our imagination is passive, stored with forms … borrowed from the world we live in. But all such forms, God has in Himself, and this is the Logos.”83 It will be seen that Bushnell was at this end of his reflection on the verge of reinventing a classical doctrine of Trinity, within his own vision of universal figural expression, and following a chain of questions analogous to those which led to the doctrine in the first place. It needed only further questioning about the relation between the metaphor that Jesus is, and those “forms” eternally possessed in God. Had he taken the final step, his achievement would have been splendid indeed; it is already remarkable.

Liberalism The time between the Civil War and the first World War has been called the “Golden Age of Liberal Theology” in America.84 It was the golden age of much else besides: of the American penchant for inventing new denominations and indeed entire religions, each with its theology; of populist atheists; of continuing waves of revival, following the frontier of settlement; of conflicts over Darwinism and German critical scholarship, with the “Fundamentalist-Modernist” controversy; and of the carryover of evangelicalism’s public activism from antislavery to “temperance,” women’s enfranchisement, and the conditions of workers. We will spend most of our remaining space with Washington Gladden (1836–1918); it therefore is pleasing that we can take chapter headings of his Burning Questions, published in 1891,85 as a list of the questions that had agitated believers in the previous period: “Has Evolution Abolished God?” “Is Man Only a Machine?” “What Is the Use of Prayer?” “Is Death the End?” “Are the Gospels Fairy Tales?” “Where is the Kingdom of God?” Much of the scene just evoked again lies beyond our scope, and must be left to another mode of scholarship.86 To give some impression of the contrasts of thought

350

ROBERT W. JENSON

in the period, we may mention just two persons. Albert Finney (1792–1875), a revivalist so successful that the chief field of his labors is known to this day as “the burnt-over district,” developed a whole theology from the experience of the revivals and Yale theologians’ affirmation of free will. Asa Gray (1810–1888),87 on quite another hand, was at once a distinguished biologist, who anticipated Darwin in many respects, and an able and self-consciously “Nicene-orthodox” lay theologian. The conservative side of the theological scene was represented and supported most ably by Charles Hodge (1797–1878), who developed and taught at Princeton Theological Seminary a system of theology that he described as “Augustinian.” His Systematic Theology, published in 1871 in two volumes,88 is a massive achievement, still well worth reading. Theology, according to Hodge, is a science parallel with the natural and social sciences; thus it is neither speculatively derived, whether from a philosophical system or from church dogma, nor derived from religious or churchly experience in the mode of Schleiermacher. The natural scientist takes the facts of nature as given, and sees his task as the discovery and ordering of the laws which these follow and display; mutatis mutandis, the theologian takes the facts of Scripture as given, and finds his legitimate task in discerning the character of God and creatures, as these constitute the system of laws which the biblical facts follow and display.89 And the biblical facts must always trump the theologian’s antecedent theories: “Science cannot make facts; it must take them as they are. In like manner, if the Bible asserts that Christ’s death was a satisfaction to justice, the theologian is not allowed to merge justice into benevolence in order to suit his theory of the atonement.”90 In Presbyterianism and beyond, Hodge’s teaching, continued by his immediate successors, was the great armament against culturally accommodated teaching and practice generally, the antitheological animus that drove much historical-critical biblical study, and the ideological aspect of Darwinism, which he correctly identified when others did not.91 Hodge’s clear, humane, and scrupulously fair style of argument surely much accounts for the strength of his influence. Between such churchly thinking as represented by Hodge and multiple sorts of radical accommodation – often called “infidelity” – liberalism flourished as the middle way. American liberalism had able and charismatic leaders, but they were not notable as constructive theologians until the Niebuhrs, who lie outside our purview. Borden P. Bowne (1847–1910) should perhaps be mentioned: he developed a “personalist” theology that enjoyed wide acceptance, becoming very nearly official in his Methodist denomination. One kind of liberalism was distinctively American and was carried by two important thinkers: Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, of whom Gladden lies within our scope. Their “Social Gospel” emerged within that strand of American Christianity that had all along seen the heart of the matter in the practice of righteousness, and indeed of public righteousness. The sort of Christianity from which Gladden begins is clearly displayed in an early popular work, Being a

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

351

Christian.92 He asks, What is a Christian? Disposing of the “ritualist” (catholic), “dogmatist” (Princeton), and “sentimentalist” (revivalist) answers in short order, he comes to his own: being a Christian means committing oneself to the person of Christ, and the content of such commitment is moral discipleship. “You must believe on him that you may learn [moral truth] of him; you must learn of him that you may follow him.”93 As for actually doing these things, there is no problem: “You become a machinist by going into a machine-shop and beginning to work at the trade of a machinist. And you become a Christian by choosing the Christian life, and beginning immediately to do the duties which belong to it.”94 There are certain “fundamental truths of all religion”: that the cosmos and history are moved by intelligent Purpose, that man has an immortal soul, and that prayer is worth doing.95 The discoveries and theories of science do not deny these truths; on the contrary, they further establish them. Thus Darwinism need not, and in its best representatives does not, deny creation by a good and loving God; it only casts a more intricate and meaningful picture of the process.96 Indeed the sciences as a whole, by revealing the “unity, the harmony, the progress that we [now] see,” “disclose to us the workings of an eternal Purpose…. It is not a demonstration, but the inference is clear and strong.”97 The particular question for Christian theology is, then, “What ought we to think of the historical Person who is revered as the Founder of Christianity?”98 “Jesus was not the [mere] founder of a religious system; He was … the Revelation to men of the … life of God, of the truth concerning their relations to God and duties growing out of these relations.”99 “God has revealed His life to men in the life of a Man,”100 who therefore claimed and deserved “Divine prerogatives and Divine honours.”101 One must, to be sure, note the past tense of these propositions. Gladden’s Christ is, as with all more properly so-called liberal theology, the historical Jesus; accordingly, defense of the Gospels as a generally reliable historical source is a necessary part of his theology.102 It is not that Gladden does not reckon with the eschatological character of Jesus’ message and acts, or is not devoted to his present lordship. Quite the contrary: “Of all the claims that Jesus made concerning Himself none is more suggestive than that which respects His hold upon the future. These predictions of His respecting the effect of His life and work upon coming ages could have been made by no one but a fanatic, or by one with Divine prescience.”103 Moreover, Gladden sees these predictions fulfilled. It is the way he sees them fulfilled that marks his liberalism, his Emersonian optimism, and the “social” character of his Gospel. “Jesus, at the very hour when the clouds were darkest, spoke … confidently respecting the kingdom which He should found upon the earth. The fulfillment of this predictions fills eighteen centuries with a steadilyincreasing light. Of all the evidences of Christianity none is so cogent … as” – and here is a shock for Gladden’s late-modern liberal and activist successors – “Christendom.”104 The boundary between more properly so-called liberal theology and other Neo-Protestantism, in America or Europe, is always an answer to the question,

352

ROBERT W. JENSON

How does it happen that Jesus now lives, and will bring the Kingdom he promised? Is it by his Resurrection, or is it by processes of historical continuity between the historical Jesus and subsequent events? For Gladden it is the second. He follows, more or less, Schleiermacher: “Jesus was the Prince of Life…. The communication of this life was by communion, and fellowship. ‘Spirit with spirit can meet,’ and the sanity of this spirit is contagious. As strength from His body went forth into the bodies of those who drew near to Him, so virtue from His Spirit was imparted to the souls of those who trusted and loved Him…. It is this spiritual life going forth from Him into the hearts of men … that has been and is the regenerating force in human hearts and human society.”105 We should note the two last phrases: regeneration by Jesus’ spirit is on the one hand personal, and on the other social. It is Gladden’s development of the second that was distinctive. And here he departs from Schleiermacher. The society that carries and enjoys the contagion of Jesus’ power is for Schleiermacher the church only; the world as a whole is timeless and thus immune to transformation. For Gladden the society being saved is precisely the world in its transformation as “Christendom,” modest in present accomplishment but clearly to be triumphant in the already looming future. Following a description of Christendom’s past “mighty work” of love between individuals and cultures, Gladden writes, “The Power that has wrought all this … is the Power that came into the world when Jesus Christ was born. This kingdom of truth and love is the kingdom that He came to establish.”106 It is the moral structure of society that is being and must be transformed: “[M]an was made for society, and finds true righteousness and enduring peace only in his relation to society.”107 Gladden has a typology for the history: “For long ages militarism, the law of the strongest ruled in society”; then “Christ’s law tempered” that rule, and “helped to bring in the present age” of capitalist industrialism, with its immense benefits of expanding wealth and opportunities for doing good. But now increasing social disruption shows that mere reliance on the market, “by which selfishness is raised to a beatitude,” will carry us no further, and that nothing but “the applications of Christ’s law and the reorganization of industrial society on that basis” can be the final solution of the ancient problems of social justice.108 In a volume tellingly titled Applied Christianity,109 Gladden lays out his vision as a program for action; it is, after all, Christians in society who must carry the power going forth from Jesus. The increase of wealth enabled by capitalism is not an evil. On the contrary: “Christianity cannot be hostile to the production of wealth without making war upon itself; for it is the one grand cause of the production of wealth in modern times.”110 The evil is that “[w]ealth is increasing very fast; [while] poverty, even pauperism, is increasing still more rapidly.111,112 It is the Christian people who must and will further transform society to achieve greater justice; Gladden expects little construction from the state. General state control of the means of production would, he predicts, bring only general impoverishment. What we now call “welfare” is necessary, but above a very modest level

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

353

dangerous due to its tendency to create a permanent pauper class.113 What the state can and must do is protect from the greatest malefactions resulting from unreformed capitalism’s dedication to greed: it must break the “trusts,” it may have to administer such industries as the railroads, and it must control speculation in stocks and commodities.114 A progressive income tax and other fiscal reforms are desirable.115 Gladden read socialist thinkers and accepted much of their critique,116 though he rejected their remedy. Just one feature of capitalism is the immediate evil to be eliminated: the commodification of labor, which compels employers to treat their fellow men as objects and employees to treat their employers as oppressors, and must forever keep laborers and those dependent on them from a fair share of society’s wealth.117 The “wage system,” as “it rests on competition as its sole basis, is anti-social and anti-Christian.” Love of the neighbor as oneself “is the Christian law,” and Christian society “must find some way of incorporating that law into the organization of labor.”118 Gladden’s immediate proposal is universal profit sharing, not as though this in itself would transform society, but as the means by which employer and employees may be enabled to deal with each as humans and Christians.119 The vision, after all, is not a set of laws or economic devices as such, but the continuing transformation of society by the historical power of love. Recruiting to that vision, and invoking Christ as its source, is Gladden’s Social Gospel.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

The conceptually decisive parts of Edwards’s system remained unknown until the late twentieth century, buried by his untimely death, in the heaps of his unpublished notes and drafts. What was known were his psychology and phenomenology of religious experience, his doctrine of virtue, his doctrine of original sin, and parts of his eschatology – which, of course, are already much. It should also be noted that Edwards was himself an enthusiastic appropriator of the thinkers seminal to the Enlightenment. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Complete Works (Cambridge, Mass.: 1855), 1:13–80. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in Emerson, Works, 1:309–340. That is to say, successful businessmen or gentlemen farmers. He did not mean the followers of Jacob Arminius specifically; the term served simply as a convenient label for backsliders from classical Reformed teaching. What in the early nineteenth century was called “Unitarianism” should be familiar to readers, since the vast majority of today’s “mainline” Protestant clergy would then have been so labeled. Since Congregationalism in America was organized by voluntary association between congregations, this sort of schism was easy. The label was accurate for the small denomination. Emerson, “History,” in Emerson, Works, 2:15. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Emerson, Works, 2:277.

354 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35

36

37 38 39 40

ROBERT W. JENSON

Emerson, “An Address,” in Emerson, Works, 1:141. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Emerson, Works, 1:81–116. Emerson, “An Address,” 1:120. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 121. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 2:255. In discussing Emerson, there is no avoiding such language, since “manliness” is part of his conception. Emerson, “Address,” 1:120. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 260. Thus Emerson did not derive his monism from his latter fascination with Indian religion; it was there all along, and was merely decorated with the Eastern motifs. Ibid., 125. One wonders what those fledgling pastors made of it. Ibid., 126. Again, one must surely sympathize with Emerson’s young hearers. Preaching, he told them, is an evil thing unless it comes from such bards, which they were accordingly instructed to become on receiving their first call. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 126–127. Ibid., 127–128. It will be seen that to whatever extent Emerson was a Hegelian, he was a “left-wing” Hegelian. Ibid., 129–130. Emerson’s complete ignorance of Chalcedonian Christology’s actual teachings should not be held against him; it was endemic in New England theology. Only Jonathan Edwards was more profound, but by reinvention, not historical knowledge. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 274: “When we have broken our god of tradition … then may God fill the heart with his presence.” Except perhaps himself. It is not accidental that Emerson preferred to live in Concord, the site of the American Revolution’s first and mythically remembered victory. Another resident of Concord was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Concord was also the home of the Alcott family, fictionalized in Little Women, which formed the imagination of generations of American children. Which, of course, America has, exactly as do other nations. And if we consider the devastations made by unleashed culture-religion elsewhere, America’s culturereligion is perhaps not the worst possible. Notably by Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: 1992). “New age” religion is patently just bowdlerized Emerson. Brownson dreamed of mysteries, and immigrant Catholicism gave him quick masses and moralistic clergy. John Nevin, The Mystical Presence (Philadelphia: 1846).

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

355

41 Schaff ’s major work is perhaps What Is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development (Philadelphia: 1846). 42 Krauth’s summary work, The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology (Philadelphia: 1872), remained a standard text and reference for over a century. 43 One name must be mentioned here, the very able Samuel Simon Schmucker, a Princeton Seminary graduate who founded the first Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in emulation of Princeton, and then founded Gettysburg College as a prep school for it. He finally went so far as to prepare and propose for adoption an edited version of the Lutheran Confession, shorn of all items that might offend established American Protestantism. By the time this was offered, however, its time was past. 44 If this procedure seems obvious, it is because it continues to rule popular theology. That it is not in fact obvious may be seen by remembering that the very category of “religion” is a modern invention – indeed, in its inner theological role, an invention of Schleiermacher himself. 45 And often in the process between Schleiermacher and Hegel, Kant and Schelling, and so on. 46 Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New York: 1847). 47 The following discussion of Bushnell’s theories of language and society is indebted, materially and for references, to Blanche A. Jenson, “Metaphor as Ordering Principle in Cultural Formation: a Brief Study in the Work of Horace Bushnell” (master’s diss., Teachers College of Columbia University, 1979). 48 The identity of Bushnell’s understandings of language and society is sometimes not fully appreciated. See Jenson, “Metaphor,” 29. 49 Mary Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 192. 50 Cheney, Life and Letters, 208. 51 Horace Bushnell, Building Eras in Religion (New York: 1881), 61–62. 52 Cited from H. Shelton Smith, ed., Horace Bushnell (New York: 1965), 77. 53 Bushnell must surely have had Emerson very directly in mind when he wrote that. 54 Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 22. 55 Ibid., 74–75. 56 Horace Bushnell, Word and Play (New York: 1910), 231–232. 57 E.g., Bushnell, Building Eras, 317. 58 Bushnell, Building Eras, 61–62. 59 Cited from Smith, Horace Bushnell, 99. 60 Ibid., 98. 61 Bushnell’s theology has no likeness to recent “theology of metaphor.” 62 Ibid., 259. 63 Ibid., 99. 64 Bushnell, Building Eras, 259. It will be seen that Bushnell’s “metaphor-theology” is the contradiction of what recently went under that name. 65 Jenson, “Metaphor,” assembled a better presentation of Bushnell’s view of language from other writings; and I have followed her lead in the foregoing. The presence and placement of this essay in Bushnell’s one major strictly theological volume are, however, crucial for understanding him: first the analysis of human life, then on to the theology.

356 66 67 68

ROBERT W. JENSON

Horace Bushnell, God in Christ (Hartford, Conn.: 1849). Ibid., 135. Ibid., 128–135. Bushnell in fact puts his finger on the problematic of Western Trinitarian doctrine: How many persons are there? One, three, or four? 69 Ibid., 127. 70 Bushnell’s cutoff date is significant. After the “Apostolic Fathers” came the Apologists, with their Logos-theology; it is exactly the speculation thereby launched that Bushnell hopes to eschew. Were this possible, it might not be a bad idea. 71 Ibid., 129. 72 Ibid., 137. 73 That is, salvation-historical. 74 Ibid., 137. 75 In another metaphysical framework than Bushnell’s vision of universal figural expression, he would thus be a fairly crude “modalist.” 76 Ibid., 138. 77 Ibid., 139. 78 Ibid., 139. 79 Ibid., 140. 80 Ibid., 140. 81 Ibid., 144. 82 Ibid., 148. 83 Ibid., 144. 84 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: 1972), 763–784. 85 Washington Gladden, Burning Questions: Of the Life That Now Is, and of That Which Is to Come (New York: 1891). 86 Specifically, to the magisterial 1158 pages of Ahlstrom’s work just cited. To be sure, readers must allow for some skewing by Ahlstrom’s preference for a moderate liberalism; e.g., the work of Charles Hodge appears only by the by. 87 Of Harvard. There were orthodox believers at Harvard, just not in the divinity school. 88 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York: 1871). 89 Ibid., I:1–17. 90 Ibid., I:13. The barb is directed at Bushnell. 91 E.g., ibid., II:14–19. 92 Washington Gladden, Being a Christian: What It Means and How to Begin (Boston: 1876). 93 Gladden, Being a Christian, 27–28. 94 Ibid., 61. 95 Gladden, Burning Questions, 163. 96 Ibid., 3–33. 97 Ibid., 32–33. 98 Ibid., 163. 99 Ibid., 169. 100 Ibid., 175. 101 Ibid., 174. 102 Ibid., 197–220,

AMERICA: TRANSCENDENTALISM TO SOCIAL GOSPEL

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

357

Ibid., 175. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 183–184. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 188–189. Ibid., 189–192. Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (Boston: 1884). Gladden, Applied Christianity, 8. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 20–22. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 52–101. Ibid., 38–52. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 33–35.

Bibliography Ahlstrom, Sydney. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, CT: 1972. Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: 1992. Miller, Perry. American Thought: Civil War to World War I. New York: 1954.

CHAPTER 17

Reformed Theology in Scotland and the Netherlands Graham McFarlane

Introduction Whilst confessional theologies within the Reformed tradition reflect significant historical and cultural differences, they are united in three clear areas. First, there is a commitment to the primacy of Scripture, albeit through a Reformed hermeneutic. Second, there lies the centrality of the Gospel as the means of revealing the Glory of God. And, last, there is an orientation toward the contemporary scene in both its cultural and ecclesial dimensions. In whatever form it took, confessional theologians delivered a message which not only was grounded in Scripture and the Gospel but also sought to address contemporary issues facing the church of their day. Herein lies the fundamental concern of reformation theology: it has to do with the entire spectrum of human existence and ultimately with the reformation of the world. Not surprisingly, then, it is the Reformed tradition that has been the most prolific in producing confessional statements. What lay at the heart of this theology was a fourfold belief by its theologians. First, they understood themselves to be part of a historical tradition. On the one hand, there was the fundamental commitment to Scripture and the Church’s creeds. It was this hermeneutical principle that drove subsequent theology. On the other hand, there was an equally important stress on the historical situation within which their theology would be unpacked. Examples of this double commitment are particularly nuanced in both the Christology of Edward Irving and John McLeod Campbell’s doctrine of atonement. Within this tradition any notion of contextualization was always tempered by a fundamental belief in there being a central core to theology. Whilst they could, as a result, be rejected for being anachronistic, that is, of an arid withdrawing into the safety of the well tried and tested, it is a testimonial to the texture of their theologies that such theologians stood high amidst their peers. The decisive theology of James Denney serves as an example of such fortitude.

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

359

In addition, the historical nature of confessional theology was driven by a deep concern that this theology express a public faith. Thus, the mandate of Reformed theology centered on its concern for the reformation of the world, and not only the church. This demanded a re-articulation of what it meant to live within the world. It is the worldview theology of Abraham Kuyper that will serve as an example of such theological reflection. Second, confessional theology within the Reformed tradition not only impacted but also was itself conditioned by a wider social context than its own ecclesial boundaries. The nineteenth century was an unprecedented time of change. What distinguished confessional theology in this period was its ability to offer a religious and cultural alternative within America, England, Scotland, and Germany. The imperative for such theologians was that their theology should engage with the world around them by means of the Gospel and that their message would only be vindicated if it were liberated from certain bondages within their tradition and be seen to help the Church in its societal witness. It is this ongoing distinction that marks confessional theology within the Reformed tradition from the more static confessions of the Roman and Orthodox Churches. Third, confessional theology offered a renewed conservatism. The significance of these differing theologies is to be gauged against the tide of liberalism and change they faced. Some, like Irving and Kuyper, anticipated the seismic changes that lay ahead and invoked the tradition they served in order to address them. In doing so, they were agents of innovation and reform. Others, like McLeod Campbell and Denney, addressed the internal worlds of the church in order to strengthen its stand in the face of such overwhelming change. Each response reflected a deeper concern for the tradition and its self-reforming nature. As W. H. Conser points out, “In an age of innovation and change, it yearned for restoration and conservatism; in an era of growing liberalism, it invoked a more traditional social vision; in a time of diminished doctrinal concern, it demanded stronger standards of belief and practice.”1 Fourth, what lay at the heart of this theology was the central belief in a living faith that was to be experienced in every aspect of life. In its purest form the confessional dimension pertained not only to the epistemological domain but also to the existential. Faith in Christ was something that was to be both believed and experienced, whether in relation to confidence in sanctification, assurance of salvation, relevance to culture, or impact on personal lifestyle. The Lordship of Jesus Christ was both epistemic and existential. In what follows, four theologians, three of them Scots – Edward Irving, John McLeod Campbell, and James Denney – and one Dutch – Abraham Kuyper – will be discussed critically in relation to the distinction they each brought to nineteenth-century reformed confessional theology. Certainly, the three Scots forged their theologies during a time of intense change within the Scottish Kirk. Each in his own way reflects the Kirk’s growing need for internal reform of its own shibboleths. Each, in turn, represents the irreversible changes taking place within both their immediate theological circles as well as society in general concerning the

360

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

inner life of the believer over the outer letter of the law, of spirituality and moral sensitivity over religion and of apologetics over dogma.2 Whilst it may be said of Irving – and of McLeod Campbell to a lesser extent – that their contributions were deemed eccentric in their day, the fact that they were more in touch with the Zeitgeist is reflected in the precocious manner in which what they said then is taken as common theological sense today. As such, all four here represent the Reformed tradition’s agility in bringing what it holds dear to theological debate and expanding its own horizon, however painful it may be to those involved.

Edward Irving (1792 –1834) The early nineteenth century was a time of significant change. This could be seen not only in political appointments (such as Peel), but also in wider ecclesial rejection of Enlightenment principles. This was, in addition, the high tide of Romantic thought. It was also a era ripe for working theologians, perhaps the most colorful cause célèbre being the Scottish London-based Presbyterian minister, Edward Irving, amongst whose friends could be counted some of the most outstanding men of his time; Chalmers, Carlyle, Coleridge, and McLeod Campbell. Culturally, London was a collection point for much that was beginning to take shape in British and European thinking. This climate suited Irving’s classically trained yet romantically inclined temperament and mind. It also suited his desire for discovering new ground during this time of cultural and professional upheaval. Although contemporary with the likes of Schleiermacher, Goethe, and Hegel, Irving was to develop and preach the kind of theology they would oppose to various degrees. Indeed, whilst the central doctrines of the incarnation, which understood Christ to be fully God and human, and the doctrine of the Trinity were being undermined and discarded for more contemporary interpretations, Irving can be understood as an apologist for all that was being swept aside in the modernist rush of the mid-nineteenth century. Irving was born in Annan, southwest Scotland, and educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he read Arts as a prelude to Divinity. By the age of seventeen, he took his degree and then spent seven years in part-time theological training. He supported himself by teaching, first at Haddington (1810) and then at Kirkcaldy (1812), where he was headmaster of the newly founded Academy. It was there that he struck up a close friendship with Thomas Carlyle, who referred to Irving, later, as “such a friend I never had again or before in this world, at heart constant till he died.” Irving was licensed to preach in 1815 and in 1819 began as assistant to the celebrated Dr. Chalmers, in St. John’s parish, Glasgow, where he worked until receiving a call in 1822 from the Caledonian Chapel in Hatton Garden, London. Irving took to mid-nineteenth-century London quickly and soon became renowned as a reputable speaker drawing large crowds to his churches. Professionally, Irving struggled with the same issues which were, ultimately, to topple both him and John McLeod Campbell, namely, the legacy bequeathed to

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

361

them by federal theology, the dominant system of Reformed orthodoxy in the seventeenth century as expressed for example in the Westminster Confession (1647). The demand of the day for Irving was to address the insecurity that such a theological horizon imposed on the believer, who, ultimately, was denied certain assurance of salvation. It is against this backdrop that Irving’s theology is to be understood and can be identified in terms of theological development, Christological innovation, and charismatic genesis. Whilst Irving is renowned and subsequently caricatured for the latter two, he cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of his theological outlook which developed at Hatton Garden. It was with this congregation that he began to defend his doctrine of God against the increasingly Unitarian theology spawned by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century deism. It would be true to say that at this point Irving can be understood as unpacking a doctrine of God that can be traced back to figures such as Hooker, Owen, and Calvin. What was significant is the degree to which it engaged with contemporary doctrines of God and sought to establish the centrality of Christ as both the Savior and eternal Son as well as to refute more heterodox responses. Typically, Irving did so in a manner which engaged with the issues rather than through mere repetition of old formulae. In this his contemporaneity is to be seen. What he did with these early sermons was to establish the grounds of assurance for relating to God in an intimate and expectant manner. Irving’s God is one who exudes grace over and against the judgment of a contract God. “Love and grace are in him; of his essence, of his ancient, eternal essence, which is unchangeable, if they are of him and in him now, they have been of him and in him forever.”3 Irving upheld Calvin’s doctrine that God is only known through his glory, and for Irving, this glory is to be seen only in the Son. The very character and identity of God, then, are revealed and ratified in the Father who sends his Son: the one verifies the other. The reforming impetus to Irving’s theology begins, however, when Irving defends his doctrine of Christ on two fronts. Each is innovative only in the sense that it decenters Irving’s thinking from the theology of the day in order to return to more aristocratic origins which reside within the wider tradition. Both, in addition, reflect Irving’s refusal to collude with the pedantic interpretations of the Westminster Confession that characterized the day. On the one hand, Irving sought to address contemporary forms of Eutycheanism; on the other hand were the more controversial expressions of charismata. With regard to the former, Irving returned to the Cappadocian maxim, “The unassumed is the unhealed.” The context of federal theology left believers in an acute state of uncertainty, the very core of which McLeod Campbell would later deconstruct with his doctrine of atonement. For Irving, the concerns were more pastoral and focused on the daily struggle each Christian has in following Christ and being holy. Without assurance that such “holiness in the flesh,” as Irving described it, was possible, the call to holiness could not reflect the Father-heart of God. Therefore, unless the Son of God assumed a human nature that was under the

362

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

curse of sin and death and overcame it on terms open and accessible to all human beings, then there was little to encourage subsequent aspirations to holiness. By Irving’s time, however, a tacit form of Eutycheanism had established itself. That is, whilst there is tacit credence given to the human and divine natures, in reality the former is absorbed by the latter in the act of incarnation and in so doing renders it redundant. Specifically, the divinity of the Son automatically sanctifies the humanity assumed in the act of incarnation. This had the effect of not only annulling any notion of a fully human nature functioning in the incarnation of the Son of God but also separating the Savior from those requiring salvation. Irving’s response was to develop the relationship between Christ and the Spirit in a manner clearly in line with Owen and Calvin back to the Church Fathers. Building on Owen’s belief that the external operations of the Trinity are indivisible, Irving sought to outline how the Spirit related to the incarnate Son in fulfilling the Father’s will. Thus, for Irving, whilst the eternal Son is the subject of all the human acts of Christ, his ability to be holy is purely the work of the Spirit. Like Owen, Irving was against any notion of the incarnation or the atoning death of Jesus Christ that suggested any independence on the Son’s part from the enabling agency of the Spirit. Foundational to Irving’s Christology is the belief in the Cappadocian maxim that the unassumed is the unhealed, that in the act of incarnation the Son identifies himself with sinful human nature. What drove this imperative was Irving’s deep pastoral concern, not unlike that of his contemporary John McLeod Campbell, that certain aspects of the Christian life can be experienced with a degree of certainty. In many ways, Irving’s theology is pastoral theology at its best because it is from his daily intercourse with his parishioners that he was driven to ask the deeper questions concerning assurance of salvation. Building on the Trinitarian theology he developed before coming down to London, Irving arrives at the belief that the Son takes to himself and overcomes a humanity that is under the curse of the Law and death. In so doing he expresses his solidarity with us and establishes the grounds for our own sanctification. He, too, with us, has to live a life of holiness – and he, too, like us, does so through the empowering agency of the Spirit. It should be noted that, for Irving, sin was not merely moral, which thus demanded juridical interpretation of atonement, but also had to do with the entire human will. It is a state of being that is displayed in subsequent doing. As such, the offer of salvation in Christ must be one that addresses this deeper aspect of human nature. The Christian call to holiness must be seen to originate in and flow from the manner in which the Son achieves it. Thus, the reforming impetus within Irving’s Christology was to show that the Son does not sanctify himself by virtue of his own divinity, which would be a form of Eutycheanism, where one nature, the divine, appears “to swallow” up the other, the human. Rather, the Son is sanctified through the indwelling of the Spirit. Thus, for Irving, sanctification is the specific modus operandi of the Spirit. Inasmuch as the believer receives the same Spirit through whom Christ overcame fallen humanity, so the believer can be reassured that holiness is not an unobtainable ideal.4

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

363

Then there is the more controversial expressions of charismata. This was a time of high eschatological expectancy during which Irving associated with a group of men who came to be called “The Albury circle,” coined from the annual meetings which took place at Henry Drummond’s home at Albury Park near Guildford. If Irving was a significant voice within orthodox nineteenth-century Christology, then he is equally an “archetypal figure of the 1820s” in relation to early charismatic developments.5 By 1828 a storm had erupted with outbreakings of glossolalia in Scotland and subsequently in 1831 in Irving’s London congregation. This charismatic outbreaking ultimately led to Irving being ousted from his church along with over six hundred followers out of which was to develop the Catholic Apostolic Church. This breakaway group was, by and large, less the result of Irving, however, than of the aristocratic group of millennialists who met under Drummond’s influence, and from whom the Catholic Apostolic Church owes its proper origins. In 1833 Irving was summoned to Annan, Scotland, in order to give an account of his “heretical” teaching concerning the sinfulness of Jesus Christ’s human nature. This, obviously, had been fueled by the events taking place in his church. However, it was on the grounds of his language about Christ’s human nature (that it was “sinful”) that Irving was subsequently excommunicated by the Presbytery of Annan from the Church of Scotland. Left without a parish and increasingly influenced by Drummond and his apostolic circle, Irving quickly deteriorated in health. This was probably as a result of the public battering he received from his Presbytery, as well as his own misplaced loyalty to the new apostles and their church. Convinced of a calling to preach the Gospel, Irving traveled north, during which he took ill and died. Ironically, Irving was to be buried in 1834, aged forty-two, in the cathedral of the church that had condemned him and indirectly brought about his early death. However, his influence can be seen in two distinct areas. First, Irving is hailed as the first Charismatic or Pentecostal theologian with a direct line being traced from Irving to the Pentecostal and Charismatic theologies of the twentieth century. Secondly, features of the Christology that were to be the cause of his expulsion from the Church of Scotland have now become normative in some circles, having been advanced by Karl Barth in the twentieth century. In both senses, Irving’s precocity has come of age.

John McLeod Campbell (1800–1872) In May 1831 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland charged John McLeod Campbell with heresy. It is difficult, today, to comprehend the astounding nature of the charge that was brought against him, namely that, the doctrine of universal atonement and pardon through the death of Christ, as also the doctrine that assurance is of the essence of faith and necessary for salvation are

364

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

contrary to the Holy Scripture and to the Confession of Faith approven by the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland, and ratified by law in the year sixteen hundred and ninety; and were moreover condemned by the fifth act of the General Assembly held in seventeen hundred and twenty, as being directly opposed to the Word of God, and to the Confession of Faith and Catechisms of the Church of Scotland.6

Described by HR Mackintosh as the greatest of Scottish theologians, McLeod Campbell’s origins are thoroughly Presbyterian. Born in Argyllshire, on the west coast of Scotland, in 1800 to a moderate Church of Scotland minister, he went on to be educated at Glasgow University (1811–1820). In 1825 he was inducted into the Church of Scotland parish of Row (pronounced “roo” and subsequently spelled “Rhu”). Like Irving, his theology stemmed from a practical source, fed by his understanding of the character of God and prompted perhaps by his schooling in Scottish Common Sense philosophy under James Mylne, successor to Thomas Reid at the University of Glasgow. What most preoccupied him, however, when he faced parish ministry was an absence of living faith amongst his parishioners. The question, then, was “Why?” Primarily, the answer lay in the fact that McLeod Campbell’s parishioners lacked a sufficient understanding of God’s love for them that assured them in turn of their own personal forgiveness and salvation. The root cause for this lay in the architectonic principles of federal or covenant theology, (from Latin foedus, “covenant”). Whilst the seeds of this theology could be traced back to Calvin, it was only in the seventeenth century that it was given its systematic shape. The relation of God to creation operated on two distinct levels, or covenants. First, there is the relationship Adam had with God prior to the Fall. Here, Adam is understood not individually, but collectively: he is the head – “federal head” – of the human race. In him every human being stands or falls. This initial relationship or covenant was based on works: these works evidenced obedience to the Creator and merited life. If Adam were obedient, he and all his heirs would experience the blessing of life. If he were disobedient, he and his heirs would be consigned to the curse of death. Secondly, however, as a result of the Fall, Adam and his descendants entered into a different covenant with God. In this covenant of grace, God chooses to elect a certain number for himself, the foundation of whose relationship with him is no longer based on their obedience and works but solely on God’s elective will in which Christ fulfils the law and becomes the new “federal head” of the elect. Relationship with God, then, is no longer dependent on human merit, but upon divine election. The problem, here, however, was that whilst all were clearly subject to the curse of death and therefore under law and its requirements, it was less apparent as to who were elected to life through divine grace. Pastorally, this was disastrous. On the one hand, the certainty of salvation no longer reposes upon the work of Christ on the cross but in a prior divine act of election. One consequence of this is that salvation is seen to be removed from the historical realm and located

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

365

in a pre-temporal divine decision. On the other, humans are not so privy to the mind of God as to be able to conclude with certainty who constitute “the elect.” The inevitable consequence was that doubt underpinned every act of belief in the saving work of Christ. Over time, entire congregations were denied assurance of both their salvation and therefore knowledge concerning the nature and character of God. There was little assurance, then, over the nature of salvation: who was elect, who was not – and if one thought one was elect, could that be a sign of hubris rather than humble gratitude in response to divine grace? Neither was there much assurance concerning the character of God: was Law primary since it extended its judgment over all, or was grace primary, despite uncertainty concerning its recipients? By McLeod Campbell’s time, the consequences of Federal Theology had widespread repercussions. J. B. Torrance has identified four deleterious consequences of Federal Theology: 1. It lost sight of Christ as head over all creation: he dies only for the elect. 2. It focused on signs of the individual’s election rather than on God. 3. It presented justice, not love, to be an essential attribute of God’s nature. 4. It understood justice and mercy as opposites.7 Not surprisingly, the pastoral repercussions were profound. These led to a degree of personal doubt about one’s salvation, the resolution of which lay at the heart of McLeod Campbell’s response. In 1856 the initial teaching that led to his excommunication from the Church of Scotland was published as The Nature of Atonement. This has become a spiritual classic in its own right. The content of the book is summed up well in the following lines, which parallel Irving’s sentiments made some forty years earlier: If love be of God’s character; if it be of His very Substance; if God is love, then of necessity God loves every man; yea, those who limit his love to some do actually deny that there is love in God at all, for this would not be love but mere partiality, and, however beneficial to those who are its object, yet in respect of Him whose choice it is it can be no manifestation of character at all.8

The brevity and simplicity of his approach were startling in this response to the rigid dogma of his day. McLeod Campbell had responded to Jonathan Edwards’ earlier acknowledgment that an adequate remedy for sin must be either an equivalent punishment or an equivalent sorrow or repentance. For Edwards, it was clearly the former: for McLeod Campbell, it was the latter. Unlike Edwards, he did not understand Christ’s sufferings as being merely penal. It was, rather, the pain of holy sorrow endured in sympathy with God and understood by McLeod Campbell in a fourfold manner.

366

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

Atonement is effected between two parties, God and human beings, and has two distinct emphases, one dealing with the past and the other dealing with the future. For McLeod Campbell, it turns on the love and kindness of God in Christ, which are seen not in the Son being the recipient of the Father’s wrath but in his identifying with humanity’s sin, acknowledging the Father’s proper response, and offering up on our behalf a repentance and sorrow that bring about atonement between otherwise alienated parties. McLeod Campbell reveals his true theological genius not only in the manner in which he responds to penal substitutionary views of atonement by offering a penitential alternative, but also in the method he assumes in presenting his doctrine of atonement. First, there is the retrospective aspect which centers on “the evil from which God’s grace delivers us.” Here, the issue of sin has to be addressed. On the one hand, it involves God in that there is a divine response to be dealt with before atonement can be made. Human sin has divine consequences. Christ’s death is in agreement with God’s condemnation of our sinfulness. On the other hand, it impacts human beings in that some kind of satisfaction has to be made before reconciliation can occur. Here, Christ offers up a perfect confession in humanity to the divine response, what McLeod Campbell describes as “a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sins of man.” Second, there is the prospective aspect which centers on the good which God’s love and kindness toward us in Christ bestow. Here Christ witnesses to human beings their true status before God whereby they may have a conscious experience of being children of God. For McLeod Campbell, atonement is about internal evidence of love, not the external manifestation of power. And, last, Christ intercedes for humanity before God and assures us of our eternal relationship before the Father. By means of this fourfold schema, McLeod Campbell underscored the centrality of assurance of salvation as a fundamental tenet of the Christian Gospel. In this respect, his theology can be understood as unpacking the central axiom of Reformed theology, sola gratia – that we are saved wholly as a result of divine grace and that such grace reveals the very heart and character of God to be Love. In The Nature of Atonement, McLeod Campbell outlines what this means with regard to the death of Christ and what it does in relation both to God and to human beings. That it cost him his ministry within the Kirk merely highlights the condition of Reformed Scottish faith during the first half of the nineteenth century.

James Denney (1856–1917) James Denney was born in May 1856 in Paisley, west of Glasgow, into a Reformed Presbyterian family. He went up to Glasgow University (1874–1879), where he graduated with a double first in Classics and Philosophy. He then studied theology at Glasgow Free Church College (1879–1893), after which he spent three years

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

367

pastoring in Glasgow before being inducted to the charge of Broughty Ferry within the Free Church of Scotland in 1886. Denney, who is described by Taylor as possessing “perfect lucidity of thought and expression,”9 was first elected as Professor of Systematic and Pastoral Theology at the Free Church College in Glasgow in 1897 but then moved on to the Chair of New Testament in 1900 before becoming Principal. In true Reformed fashion, he was biblically grounded, theologically aware, and culturally sensitive, a man described by P. T. Forsyth as “the theological prophet” and of whom H. R. Mackintosh remarked that “as theologian and as man, there was no one like him.” Denney’s significance lies in the fact that he came to be identified with a school of theology described by Drummond as the “New Evangelicalism.” Amongst this group could be counted Marcus Dods, George Adam Smith, Henry Drummond, and A. B. Bruce. What held them together was their commitment to an open engagement with the modern mind whilst holding to the truth of an evangelical Christian faith. To do so involved taking on board new approaches to the authority of Scripture as well as the place of doctrine yet in a manner that was consistent with a confessional theology. The hallmark of Denney’s theology is reflected in his own theological method. Once again, in him we meet a theology that was rooted in Scripture, influenced by the Reformers, and yet engaged with the contemporary scene. He was apparently the first Scottish theologian seriously to study Kierkegaard, and he took what he considered to be the best of contemporary German theology and applied it to his own situation. The predominant theological school of his day was Ritschlianism, a theology that he was to draw upon, identifying with Ritschl’s emphasis on the historicity of the New Testament and a disdain for traditional dogma. Yet, at the same time, Denney was to disagree much with Ritschl and his overall eschewal of metaphysics. For Denney, rather, metaphysics is the science which deals with the ultimate reality of things, with the truth which is beneath, and through all things, and makes them what they are. To a Christian, that ultimate reality is the reconciling love of God with which faith has acquainted him in Jesus Christ.10 Denney’s theology maintains two distinct but intimately related themes. On the one hand, the early Denney stands within the mainstream of the Scottish tradition in its belief that the “human mind has the capacity for a rational knowledge of God and his ways.”11 It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that Denney was not content simply to teach mere data about the atonement, but also wished to explain why it works and how it achieves its end. We may detect McLeod Campbell’s influence here, a fact that is particularly poignant given that Denney’s birth coincided with the year The Nature of Atonement was first published. On the other hand, throughout his life Denney held deeply to the belief that such knowledge was meaningful only to the degree that it led to an experience of and relationship with God. This emphasis upon personal experience was both positive in that it was rooted in the work of Christ in reconciling human beings to God, and negative in that it stood against any grand, metaphysical organizing principle that sought to impose

368

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

itself upon the Christian experience. For Denney, doctrine was always to be qualified by personal spirituality, as the following quotation reveals in sentiments that parallel those of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen: We are not bound to any Christology, or to any doctrine of the work of Christ. No intellectual construction of what Christ’s presence and work in the world mean is to be imposed beforehand as a law upon faith, or a condition of membership in the Church. It is faith which makes a Christian; and when the Christian attitude of the soul to Christ is found, it must be free to raise its own problems and work out its own solutions.12

The combination of the two explain to some extent why Denney was so unwilling to give way to the theological and methodological changes that were sweeping across Europe and to which so many of his contemporaries were succumbing. That this is seen as a strength rather than an anachronism is probably due to the more conservative nature of Scottish theology. Such an approach is best reflected in his lectures delivered at the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1894, later published as Studies in Theology. Here, Denney unpacked a theology of the incarnation, one rooted in an Alexandrian Logos Christology. This probably represents his major published contribution as a theologian. Undoubtedly, however, Denney reveals his prominence as a biblical and dogmatic theologian when he turned his attention to the doctrine of the atonement. Here, he presents an uncompromisingly conservative emphasis on the centrality of the death of Christ as given within the New Testament. Denney held firmly to the belief that within the New Testament there is presented a clear understanding of the death of Christ, namely, of a divine response to human sin which fell upon Christ and was exhausted by his salvific work on the cross. Denney combined a strong theology of the cross with other surprisingly liberal elements, for example on miracles and the authority of Scripture. It is to his lasting credit that his stand on this matter paved the way for later theologians, including P. T. Forsyth and H. R. Mackintosh, to speak out and articulate subsequent theological formulations that held firm to biblical and dogmatic truths whilst being free to speak to the contemporary situation.13

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) Foremost amongst those who sought to advance the idea of a specifically Christian influence within wider non-Christian society is the Netherlander theologian-politician, Abraham Kuyper. Born near Rotterdam in 1837 into a Moderate Presbyterian family, Kuyper was to become one of the most protean as well as polarizing figures of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands. That he came to be renowned for political and social as well as theological reasons not only reflects the stature of this post-Renaissance man but also suggests

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

369

strongly that his activities as political and ecclesiastical reformer were intimately related. The reasons for this relate to Kuyper’s own historical context. In the early quarter of the nineteenth century, the kingdom of the Netherlands emerged under the monarchy of King William I of Orange after the ravages of the French Revolution. One significant move on William’s part was to create a new relationship between Church and State in which the State was a major shareholder in the Church’s affairs. For this to happen successfully, it was necessary to relocate the place of the traditional creeds of the Reformed Church – the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. These mainstays were all but ignored in favor of formulae which lent themselves to a more specifically National church that would unite the new Protestant state. Whilst this drive was widely accepted, there were those amongst the Reformed Church who opposed it. In the face of this enforced rejection of the historic confessions, a group of dissenters declared an Act of Separation and Return. From this, there emerged a group called the Separatists who sought to return to the true confessions of the Reformed Church. This group of dissenters was to find a voice outside its own immediate circle in the senior statesman, Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876), who sought to reform the Church from within but whose scathing criticism of the Church’s subservience to the State was to influence those who came after him. It was his mantle that eventually fell on the shoulders of Abraham Kuyper. It was immediately after his university training at Leiden (BA, 1858; Doctor of Theology, 1862) and prior to his being called to a country parish that Kuyper underwent what he calls a “conversion” from a “progressive” or liberal stance to a strictly confessional Christian faith. Kuyper understood this religious conversion not as a moral event but as involving the rejection of a particular way of perceiving the self and the world it inhabited. During the subsequent years, Kuyper worked in a quiet parish ministry where he was able to develop his understanding of what constituted a specifically Christian worldview. Then, in 1870, he moved to Amsterdam. It was against the massive social, economic, political, and cultural changes that had taken place in Dutch society in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that Kuyper’s own restless personality was to lay the foundations for a distinct approach to politics that would come to be known as “Kuyperian”: a Christian worldview that was to be free of non-Christian ideologies. Whilst there can be no doubt as to Kuyper’s immense productive energy (from national statesman to church politician, founding father of both political party and university, newspaper editor, and metaphysician), two distinct influences can be identified that enabled Kuyper to develop his worldview. First, there was the influence of van Prinsterer himself. Through his partnership with van Prinsterer, Kuyper was to link up with van Prinsterer’s reforming group within Parliament which sought to loosen the State’s hold over the National Church. The partnership between the two men was to result in the formation of the first modern political party within the Netherlands, the Anti-Revolutionary Party. This

370

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

sought to redress the cry “No God, No Master” of the French Revolution, its aim being to present a specifically Christian outlook within contemporary politics. This was undoubtedly aided by the fact that Kuyper was also editor of the national newspaper De Standaard, the official organ of the Anti-Revolutionary Party. What came out of this was eventually a political party that came to power in 1889 with Kuyper becoming Prime Minister in 1905 and leading the party in thirteen national parliamentary campaigns. There can be few theologians who can make claim to such political eminence as Kuyper. And yet it is for his theological productivity that he is equally remembered. Second, it was the theological foundation behind Kuyper’s politico-social intent that drove him to seize the political opportunities available in this time of major change. These are summarized in one of Kuyper’s most original themes, namely, his understanding of the sovereignty of God. This has to be read within the context of eighteenth-century atheism, which brought with it the tyranny and destructiveness of unbelief and the super-state sovereignty of nineteenthcentury German philosophy. Kuyper called it “sovereignty in its proper realm” (souvereiniteit in eigen kring) or “sphere sovereignty,” as opposed to popular sovereignty where people decide what is normative in life. Here Kuyper developed a Calvinistic doctrine of creation in which creation is constituted by different cultural realms or spheres each of which has its own boundaries. It is only as we allow each sphere to operate according to its own modus operandi that we live according to the Creator’s pattern. Kuyper understood such sovereignty to operate on three particular levels. First, there was the belief that ultimate sovereignty is God’s alone. Second, all other rulers operate under God. Last, there is no mediating earthly power. In this, Kuyper developed his own understanding of the political dimension of Reformed theology that has been developed elsewhere, albeit differently and less overtly by the likes of Irving, McLeod Campbell, and Denney. Like them, he was no modernist. Once again, we meet in him a traditionalist seeking to defend what he believed to be central to his faith in the face of nineteenth-century philosophies opposed to the Gospel. He did so on two fronts. On the one hand there was a concern to update the cultural and public dimensions of Calvinism in order that the Gospel may address the wider culture. On the other, there was the desire to oppose all forms of secularization whether religious or social. Both dimensions show that, for Kuyper, the Christian faith is not only for salvation but also for the whole of life. Kuyper fully understood that if the Reformed Church was to be Calvinist again, its followers had to grasp the fact that the Christian faith has relevance for every dimension of human activity. The conviction with which Kuyper held this belief is best expressed in his own words: One desire has been the ruling passion of my life; One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. And sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that is laid upon me, let the breath of life fail me. It is this: that in spite of all worldly opposition, God’s holy ordinances shall be established again in

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

371

the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people; to serve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God.14

Kuyper’s was a vision for the entire spectrum of human existence. This demanded that politics were to be understood from within a Christian perspective. It demanded, too, that Christians pursue every aspect of existence from a purely Christian angle. Foundational to his thought was the belief that Christians and unbelievers were members of completely different worlds. Undoubtedly, this worldview accommodated a form of religious dualism that is further reflected in the different ways in which Kuyper’s initial thinking has been developed. However, the hallmark remains: only as Christians understood and applied the principles and practices from their world would they, in turn, have something with which to influence that of their unbelieving counterparts. This was not all one-sided, as though Christians had the monopoly on all of life. Rather, Kuyper developed a doctrine of common grace which enabled him to open up the hitherto insular thinking of Reformed churches in order to understand better their place and contribution to the wider worlds of politics and education. It is only through God’s kindness that the consequences of unbelief are not allowed to cause havoc. Unbelievers have insights from which believers can benefit. As such, it was possible for both parties to work together for a common goal, despite their opposing motives. In 1898 at Princeton Seminary under the auspices of the L. P. Stone Foundation, Kuyper delivered six lectures on Calvinism. Here he unpacked his Christian life and worldview to the English-speaking world under six headings: Calvinism as a Life System, Calvinism and Religion, Politics, Science, Art, and the Future. The content of such lectures was particularly pertinent to the American scene at that time, where liberals exercised a stranglehold on the institutions of the Presbyterian Church. Within this context, these lectures were very much the mature conclusions of a statesmanlike thinker. In them Kuyper attacked what he understood to be the roots of the present nineteenthcentury malaise – the individualism that spawned the French Revolution. “The leading thoughts that had their rise in the French Revolution at the close of the last, and in German philosophy in the course of the present century, form together a life-system which is diametrically opposed to that of our fathers.” The fault of both ideologies was that they sought to liberate the social and individual self from God. One difficulty in evaluating Kuyper is the diverse nature of his writings as well as the fragmentary nature of his thought. Here was a national figure who inhabited a world in which it was possible to wear several hats with equal dignity. What he did leave to the Reformed tradition was a vision for bringing together Church and State in such a way that the salvation that was once and for all delivered to the saints – which the likes of Irving, McLeod Campbell, and Denney sought to defend – could engage with the wider culture.

372

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

Conclusion It is difficult to assess the achievements of these four men and the wider tradition to which they directly and indirectly belonged. Without doubt, the hegemonic nature of subsequent liberal theology and its stranglehold on European and American academia meant that their immediate influence was muted. It has to be remembered that nineteenth-century Calvinistic confessional theology fought for a voice in the face of a formidable and vocal alternative that dominated the religious scene. In many ways, the two traditions were incommensurable. That the influence and import of each of these theologians are recognizable today reflects their own personal strength of character and keenness of intellect. However, in terms of direct influence it is perhaps Abraham Kuyper who made the greatest impact. To some extent this is an obvious consequence: here is a theology that addresses the need to engage with culture whilst at the same time maintaining its own theological distinctions. His immediate political and theological success has ensured his ongoing influence. His impact has been consolidated by the likes of H. Bavinck (1854–1921), H. Dooyeweerd (1894–1977), and successive writers on the American scene. Kuyperian Calvinism went on to make its presence most strongly felt in both the political punch of the post–World War II neo-evangelical movement and the late twentieth-century Moral Majority. Given the protean nature of Kupyerianism’s cultural agenda, it is likely that this tradition will continue to impact the American and Dutch scenes well into the present century. Whilst it is less obvious what impact the likes of Irving, McLeod Campbell, and Denney have for contemporary theology, their contribution and significance are yet to be fully accounted. As the modernist paradigm crumbles, the subterranean voices of thinkers dismissed by the previously predominant “progressive” paradigm are able to emerge. Undoubtedly, James Denney’s stance against the liberalizing of Christian belief and his conviction that there remains a central core to the Christian Gospel facilitated in part a robust evangelicalism in later Scottish Presbyterianism. Surprisingly, then, Denney’s contribution remains relatively ignored. The same cannot be said for John McLeod Campbell and his understanding of atonement. This has been advanced through the later expressions given by not only Denney but also the likes of Moberley, Forsyth, T. F. Torrance, and J. B. Torrance. In the face of present soteriologies where the notions of punishment and law are deemed illegitimate to the postmodern concern, a theology of the cross that defines the relational dimension of human existence and its pathologies is to be welcomed. There has been no better time than now for a Christology that endorses human identity in relation to God as Father and outlines how it can be achieved in the manner delivered by McLeod Campbell nearly 150 years ago.

SCOTTISH AND DUTCH REFORMED THEOLOGY

373

In addition, as Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity expand at rapid rates, outstripping those of every other wing of the church, it is Edward Irving who has supplied a theology that facilitates existential appreciation of the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, too, as the Constantinian nature of Alexandrian Christology loses its dominance in western Christianity, with its stress on the divine Son at the expense of the human Jesus, so we find in Irving’s writings a more human (yet still divine) Christ. In many ways, the confessional theology of each of these theologians is rooted in its own historical context. Its success is largely reflected in the fact that over a century later, their works address the deeper questions left unanswered by their more Herculean contemporaries on the European continent. And herein lies the secret of their longevity: they belong to a theological tradition the nature of which is to be constantly dynamic and vocal. What unites them is a deeply rooted conviction that there is indeed a faith once and for all delivered to the saints that needs to be fought for and defended vigorously. To do so demands a conviction that all theology requires constant reforming. What makes each distinct, on the other hand, is the equally foundational belief that the purpose for such reformation is that Jesus Christ be proclaimed – confessed – anew to each emerging generation.

Notes 1 W. H. Conser, Church and Confession (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 328. 2 See A. C. Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1983), chap. 3. 3 Edward Irving, Collected Writings (London: Strahan, 1864), 4:444. 4 Edward Irving, The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord’s Human Nature (1830); and Edward Irving, Christ’s Holiness in the Flesh (1831). 5 Timothy C. F. Stunt, Evangelical Radicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–1835 (London: Continuum, 2000), 133. 6 Church of Scotland, Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, May 1831, 1, emphasis added. 7 J. B. Torrance, “The Contribution of John McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 26 (1973): 303–305. 8 John McLeod Campbell, Responsibility for the Gift of Eternal Life (London, 1873), 88, emphasis in original. 9 Taylor, God Loves Like That (London: SCM, 1962), 10. 10 James Denney, “Dogmatic Theology,” Expositor, ser. 5, vol. 6 (1897): 431. 11 B. M. G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore (London: Longman, 1971), 429. 12 James Denney, Jesus and the Gospel (London: 1909), 382–383. 13 For a further study of Denney’s theology of the atonement, see James Gordon, James Denney (1856–1917): An Intellectual and Contextual Biography (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006). 14 Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1961), iii.

374

GRAHAM MCFARLANE

Bibliography Bratt, James D. Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. Cheyne, A. C.The Transforming of the Kirk. Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1983. Dorries, D. W. Edward Irving’s Incarnational Christology. Fairfax: Xulon Press, 2002. Gordon, James. James Denney (1856–1917): An Intellectual and Contextual Biography. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006. Heslam, P. S. Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. McFarlane, Graham. Christ and the Spirit: The Doctrine of the Incarnation According to Edward Irving. Carlisle, PA: Paternoster, 1996. Taylor, John R. God Loves Like That: The Theology of James Denney. London: SCM, 1962. Tuttle, George. So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement. Edinburgh: Handsel, 1986.

CHAPTER 18

Neo-Scholasticism Ralph Del Colle

Neo-Scholasticism in the nineteenth century signified a unique circumstance in the history of Catholic theology. When Pope Leo XIII promulgated his Encyclical Letter Aeterni Patris on August 4, 1879, it represented a papal magisterial endorsement of Neo-Scholastic and more specifically Neo-Thomist theology and philosophy. Even for the Catholic Church, this was a rare event. Ecclesiastical authority had never so directly promoted a particular school of theology and its concomitant methodology. Commonly entitled “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy,” the encyclical was self-consciously situated amid challenges posed to the Church and Catholic faith in the modern era.1 The concerns of Leo XIII and the Neo-Scholastic theologians who drafted the encyclical largely focused around issues of faith and reason. Nearly a decade earlier, when the bishops of the Catholic Church were assembled for the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), their promulgation of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, had already raised these concerns for the Church at large, not to mention the 1864 Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX. The latter in proscriptive fashion had listed the errors of the age that were to be condemned. Dei Filius, on the other hand, devoted its chapters and canons to a more positive statement on the relationship between revelation, faith, and reason. Aeterni Patris went even further to commend a program of study by which “the forces of revelation and reason” could undergird the Church as “the invincible bulwark of the faith.”2 These interests of the Catholic magisterium, papal and conciliar, did not occur in isolation throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century. Catholic theologians and philosophers were already engaged in the philosophical debates of the age spurred on by the European Enlightenment and its progenies as well as the political and social revolutions that ensued. Neo-Scholastic theology and philosophy were part of a diverse Catholic theological endeavor to adjudicate the intellectual foundations and interpretation of faith amid the emerging culture of Western modernity. With the help of the magisterium and its further interventions at the

376

RALPH DEL COLLE

beginning of the twentieth century, Neo-Scholasticism eventually gained the ascendancy in Catholic seminaries and institutes of study. All of this is due in part to the sense of urgency that informed these interventions and was reflected in the polemical rhetoric of both the Neo-Scholastics and their magisterial supporters, much of which was directed against theological and philosophical trends which chartered a different course than that advocated by those who promoted the revival of Scholastic thought and methods. Aeterni Patris was no exception. Quoting the Apostle Paul’s warnings about the corruption of “philosophy and vain deceit,” Leo XIII expressed his concern “that all studies should accord with the Catholic faith, especially philosophy, on which a right apprehension of the other sciences in great part depends.”3 Although the turn to Scholasticism was presented as a “restoration,” Aeterni Patris was responding to the contemporary problem of how faith and reason needed to be integrated to enable an adequate and comprehensive response to the contestation over truth and religion. More so than other theologies, Neo-Scholasticism was dependent upon the service of philosophy. As Aeterni Patris envisioned, it was only by “taking up the study of philosophy … [that one could] respond most fitly to the true faith, and at the same time be most consonant with the dignity of human knowledge.”4 Any contradiction between faith and reason was ruled out,5 and it took to task those Catholic philosophers who in “throwing aside the patrimony of ancient wisdom” failed to establish that bulwark by which revelation and reason are united.6 However, if one turned to the Fathers of the Church and then to “the doctors of the middle ages, who are called scholastics,”7 one would discover how their “proper and special office” was skillfully to bind together “human and divine science.”8 Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Angelic Doctor, was preeminent in this regard, and because in the encyclical’s estimation he towered above all others – although due mention is made of the seraphic St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) – the turn to Scholasticism became a turn to Thomism. Hence, much of what occupied the Neo-Scholastic movement was the rise and eventual ascendancy by papal support and mandate of Neo-Thomism. In order to understand the vision and program of the Neo-Scholastics, it would do well to appreciate the attraction that an integrated system of philosophy and theology would hold for Catholic theologians who were experiencing a rather turbulent time for the Church in an age of rapid social and political developments. The defensive posture of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century was a response to the aggressive anticlericalism of the French Revolution and its aftermaths throughout Catholic Europe. For the papacy this culminated in the loss of the Papal States during the Risorgimento in Italy such that the First Vatican Council had to cut short its deliberations in Rome due to the hostile political situation. Ultramontanism was one ecclesiastical response to this situation within the Church and the declaration on papal infallibility at that Council was certainly a culmination of these impulses. To say the least, an anti-revolutionary mood was pervasive in the Church of Rome.

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

377

While there is no doubt that political circumstances affected both theology and the church, it is also true that serious philosophical and theological issues were being raised as matters of both methodology and substance during the course of the emergence and eventual ascendancy of Neo-Scholasticism. These came typically to characterize Catholic theology until the Second Vatican Council (1962– 1965), and precisely because of the appeal to the Scholastic heritage of Catholic thought, that horizon of issues still informs Catholic theology even if Scholastic method is no longer prominent. By identifying the cause of Scholasticism (and in some cases Thomism) with Catholic orthodoxy, the Neo-Scholastic movement also reinforced the role of the magisterium in exercising its function as the guardian of Catholic doctrine. The pontificates of Pius IX (1846–1878), Leo XIII (1878– 1903), and Pius X (1903–1914) witnessed the identification of heterodox theologies within the Catholic Church and were not hesitant in taking action. Before returning to the significance of the magisterial interventions and their follow-up in the twentieth century, we begin with a brief overview of the history of Scholasticism and the reason for its appeal.

Scholasticism and the History of Catholic Thought Maurice De Wulf (1867–1947), professor of philosophy at Louvain, a stronghold of Neo-Scholasticism, underscored the difficulty of defining Scholasticism especially in light of its common usage. Not only is it a “vague designation of the philosophical and theological speculation of the Middle Ages,” but also for many it is “a synonym for the out-of-date, the naive, the scientifically worthless.”9 Later usages are as ambiguous as, for example, when Hans Küng (1928–) once described Karl Rahner (1904–1984) as the last of the Neo-Scholastics,10 or when John Courtney Murray (1904–1967) suggested that Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a Scholastic.11 But in each of these there is a truth well worth noting. De Wulf was careful to distinguish between Scholastic philosophy and theology and between extrinsic and intrinsic definitions of Scholasticism. Whether Scholasticism is more characterized by a distinctive method or the doctrines it espouses sets the parameters respectively for the two types of definition. Being a product of the schools (as in medieval Scholasticism) does not in and of itself get at the essence of the movement in his judgment. Nor does an enumeration of methods – whether constructive or pedagogical (as these certainly varied in the history of Scholasticism) – capture it as well. Scholasticism is better defined by the doctrines it espouses, which in his philosophical focus are metaphysical, epistemological, and anthropological in nature. No doubt such doctrines and their methodological instruments cannot be entirely separated, but it is interesting that De Wulf is quite clear that the relationship between philosophy and theology must be guarded well and understood precisely. Aware of the broad use of the term (e.g., Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu scholasticism), his point was to refute the notion that Scholastic philosophy is simply subject to the dogmas of

378

RALPH DEL COLLE

the respective religion. De Wulf argued that the two disciplines as they emerged in the Middle Ages underwent a parallel formation that manifested itself in “the subordination and co-ordination of their doctrines.”12 By this he meant that in the case of the former the subordination was material and not formal, with philosophy respecting the truth of Catholic dogma while arriving at its own doctrines on the basis of reason alone.13 DeWulf ’s observation is important for understanding the development of NeoScholasticism where philosophy and theology intersect programmatically. In this respect, John Courtney Murray’s observation about Sartre is insightful. Murray’s exact observation was that Sartre was a Scholastic in “an odd, inverted way.”14 By this he meant the Scholastic quest has to do with the intelligibility of faith – Sartre’s query being the existential intelligibility that God is dead, hence the inversion – pursuant to the Augustinian axiom adopted and developed by Anselm that one believes in order to understand, crede ut intelligas. At the very least and basic to Scholasticism is this mutually hospitable relationship between faith and reason. Küng’s quip about Karl Rahner is also informative about the character of NeoScholasticism, in this case in regard to its theological substance. His charge is that Rahner’s theology of the “supernatural existential” remained the product (with due consideration given to his innovations) of the natural-supernatural paradigm of Neo-Scholasticism. For Küng, this meant that Rahner was still within the system of Roman theology on this and other issues, for example, papal infallibility. On this count, despite the polemic Küng correctly identifies the major issue that drove Neo-Scholastic theology, namely, the integrity of nature and the supernatural character of grace. Before returning to these two themes – faith and reason, nature and supernature – we will first give an account of the history. Inevitably there are debates about how to schematize the history of Scholasticism. One example will suffice. Gerald McCool (1918–2005), to whose work we will continually return, identifies three stages in this history, each associated with the thought of Thomas Aquinas.15 He also classifies the period in concert with a dominant methodological approach. The first period is that of St. Thomas himself, where the procedure of the quaestio or question drove inquiry, as is evident in his Summa theologiae.16 Yves Congar (1904–1995) has placed this early period within the larger perspective of the advent of Scholasticism in general, determined in large measure by the “entry” of three methodological regimes which characterize the West’s reception of Aristotle: those of grammar, dialectics, and metaphysics.17 While medieval Scholasticism was by no means homogeneous – the difference between the Franciscan and Dominican schools alone supports this – it was Thomas Aquinas who most clearly embraced the work of Aristotle with its metaphysical implications, although the impact of Aristotle was much broader. But even with Aquinas it would be a misnomer to describe his philosophy and theology as Christian Aristotelianism. As David Knowles (1896–1974) has stated, there emerged from Aquinas’s thought “the first original philosophical system that Christianity has seen – neither Platonism, nor

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

379

Aristotelianism, nor Augustinianism, but Thomism.”18 The Neo-Scholastics were cognizant of this, and it was for that reason that Neo-Thomism would dominate the field in the Neo-Scholastic restoration of the nineteenth century, as one recalls the common title of Aeterni Patris, “On Christian Philosophy.” The plurality in Scholasticism was self-evident throughout the Middle Ages, giving rise to substantial differences in metaphysics and epistemology between Thomists and more traditional Augustinians as a classic instance. This was due in no small measure to the extent to which Aristotle was received. For example, the differences between Aquinas and Bonaventure on whether the senses are intrinsic to the knowledge of universals betray not only their respective proclivities for Aristotle and Plato, but also whether Augustine’s illumination theory of knowledge as in the case of Bonaventure could sufficiently account for the relationship between the doctrines of creation and redemption, between nature and grace. High Scholasticism, its golden age, would give way to the Late Scholasticism of the nominalists prior to the Reformation, and in some quarters, among the Renaissance humanists, it was subjected to widespread derision. This does not discount the continued notoriety of great Thomists such as John Capreolus (1380–1444) and Thomas Cajetan (1469–1534). Nevertheless, Erasmus’s (1466–1536) remark that “the methods that our Scholastics follow only render more subtle the subtlest of subtleties; for you will more easily escape from a labyrinth than from the snares of the Realists, Nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Occamists, and Scotists,”19 as well as the decidedly anti-Scholastic piety of the devotio moderna, sufficiently illustrate the extent to which non-Scholastic paradigms were able to make their entrance into theology. This was the case especially in the case of the Reformers, with the caveat that the Reformers were more thoroughly theological that the purported Christian philosophy of many Christian humanists. This somewhat sketchy review of the history of the first Scholasticism illustrates the intra-Scholastic controversies that have always attended its development. Debates between the schools and disagreements within a school, for example, Thomism, informed Scholastic theology and philosophy nearly as much as direct engagement with non-Scholastics. These intra-Scholastic controversies would dominate the “Second Scholasticism” of the Post-Tridentine period, often known as “Baroque Scholasticism.” This period was characterized by commentaries on St. Thomas (John of St. Thomas, 1589–1644), Counter-Reformation controversial theology (Robert Bellarmine, 1542–1621), and intra-Scholastic doctrinal debates, for example, the heated disagreement between Domingo Bañez (1528– 1604) and Luis de Molina (1535–1600) over free will, predestination, and grace (the De Auxiliis controversy that occupied the theologians of their respective religious orders – Dominicans and Jesuits, in this case – for some years, only to be put to an end in 1607 by Pope Paul V [1552–1621]). Parallels existed in Protestant Orthodoxy where inter-confessional and intra-confessional doctrinal controversies abounded. The disputatio of medieval Scholasticism became focused in such

380

RALPH DEL COLLE

doctrinal disputes during the Baroque period even while humanist and then Enlightenment philosophies were charting a non-ecclesiastical agenda relative to the claims of positive or confessional theology.

The Rise of Neo-Scholasticism Catholic theology and philosophy by the time of the nineteenth century were by no means dominated by Scholasticism. Prior to mid-century and then with the assistance of Aeterni Patris, a revival of Scholasticism, a “Third Scholasticism,” took place. Although there is much truth to this threefold schematic, with the third phase being a Leonine-inspired and predominantly Thomist revival, there had been a continuous tradition of Scholastic theology since the medieval era even with its ebbs and flows. This was especially true of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans. It was their master general, John Thomas de Boxadors (1703–1780), later to be made Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, who by the authority of an encyclical letter in 1757 exhorted his brethren to the study of St. Thomas, something already distinctive to their order. He followed through with a second letter in 1761 and promoted the work of fellow Dominican, Salvatore Roselli (1722– 1784), who wrote a Summa on the philosophy of the Angelic Doctor.20 However, the intentional launching of the Neo-Scholastic project, so to speak, began slightly prior to midcentury and was to be the most formative influence on Catholic theology until its rather quick demise by the time of the Second Vatican Council. Its beginnings can be traced to movements in both Italy and Germany. It was no accident that when Gioacchino Pecci (1810–1903) ascended the papal throne as Leo XIII he would promulgate Aeterni Patris. Here was a pope who was a participant in and advocate of the new movement. Neo-Scholasticism, if one could locate its genesis, certainly in part would be traced to Perugia, where Gioacchino and his brother Giuseppe (1807–1890) were key actors in the renaissance of Thomistic philosophy. As bishop, Gioacchino reformed the diocesan seminary and instituted the Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Giuseppe held the chair of philosophy, having been influenced earlier by the Jesuit Serafino Sordi (1793–1865), who taught in various schools of the Society of Jesus.21 Giuseppe, originally a Jesuit himself, would later leave the order and continue his work in diocesan contexts. The establishment of other similar academies, including one in Rome, contributed to the growth of Neo-Scholasticism and to Neo-Thomism in particular. This illustrates the common mind and even some connections that contributed to the revival of Thomism in Italy, among secular priests, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Vincentians. Others among the Neo-Scholastics included Gaetano Sanseverino (1811– 1865) and his student Salvatore Talamo (1844–1932) in Naples. The latter attracted the attention of Giuseppe Pecci, who, after he was made a Cardinal by his brother, called Talamo to Rome as his replacement for an academic post that he held.22 Another collaborator within the circle of the Pecci brothers was the

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

381

Dominican Tommaso Zigliara (1833–1893), who first taught at the diocesan seminary in Perugia before moving to the Minerva, the Dominican College of St. Thomas in Rome. There he was joined by Alberto Lepidi (1838–1925). Each possessed his distinctive approach to St. Thomas, with Zigliara concentrating on the Aristotelian aspects of Thomas and Lepidi on the mystical.23 As was the case with the pope’s brother, Zigliara was elevated to the College of Cardinals by Leo XIII in 1879, the year Aeterni Patris was promulgated, and later in 1887 was named prefect of the Congregation of Studies in the Roman Curia, a key position for the promotion of the Thomistic renaissance. Again, this underscores the concerted efforts that occurred during the pontificate of Leo XIII which promoted and implemented the Neo-Scholastic movement. No survey would be complete without mentioning the importance of the Jesuits in the eventual triumph of Neo-Scholasticism. Whether they were the most important force in the spread of Neo-Scholasticism may be debated, but they were a formidable one. True, the Vincentians staffed the Collegio Alberoni, the diocesan seminary near Piacenza, a longtime stronghold of Thomism since the eighteenth century (founded in 1751). Also, the Higher Institute of Philosophy in Louvain, founded in the 1880s with the support of Leo XIII by Désiré Mercier (1851–1926), later Cardinal Archbishop of Malines (1906), played an important role in the revival of Thomism in northern Europe. The significance of the latter was the emergence of a Thomistic school, historical in orientation and conversant with the sciences – led by the great historian of Scholasticism, Maurice de Wulf.24 This differed from the orientation most common in the Society of Jesus, where the influence of the great Jesuit commentator, Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), was dominant. The progress of Neo-Scholasticism among the Jesuits is an important chapter in its history. As with much in the movement, there were connections among the actors early on. Two brothers who would enter the Society of Jesus, Serafino and Domenico Sordi (1790–1880), were students of Vincenzo Buzzetti (1777–1824), a Vincentian-influenced Thomist at the Collegio Alberoni.25 It was Serafino, as already mentioned, who would influence a fellow Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli (1793– 1862), and through him the future Leo XIII. Equally important, at least for the development of Neo-Thomist thought, Domenico taught Matteo Liberatore (1810–1892) and Carlo Maria Curci (1810–1891), who along with Josef Kleutgen (1811–1883) were perhaps the most influential of the Jesuit Neo-Scholastics. Liberatore, a professor of philosophy in Naples and a somewhat late convert to Thomism, joined the staff of the new Jesuit review Civiltá cattolica (directed by Curci), which became a major instrument in the promotion of Neo-Scholasticism. A description of him before his conversion by Gerald McCool is revelatory of the many issues that informed the development of the movement. Prior to 1850, Liberatore appeared to be a typical mid-century Jesuit conservative: an eclectic realist in philosophy, with little sympathy for the new philosophical and theological systems, but with no interest in proposing another system to replace them.26

382

RALPH DEL COLLE

The most significant issues are the relationship between philosophy and theology, the methodological account of the Catholic sensibility of the compatibility between faith and reason, and, at the ontological level, the relation of nature and grace. The commitment to realism (even before his adoption of Thomism) characterizes the Catholic philosophical range with its theological affirmations of incarnation and sacramentality. Finally, the systemic impulse, absent prior to his conversion, became programmatic for the entire movement, embraced by its practitioners and advocated by papal magisterium.

The Concerns of the Neo-Scholastics Liberatore along with Kleutgen were instrumental in the Jesuit-led critique of other Catholic philosophical systems and in the establishment of Neo-Thomism as the most influential bulwark of the Neo-Scholastic movement with direct links to Aeterni Patris. If anything, the rise of Neo-Scholasticism had to do with how Catholic theology and philosophy sought to engage the errors of the modern world, although most of the energy was spent within the Church contesting against existing Catholic efforts in this arena, and their inadequacy in the face of the challenge as perceived by the new movement. As McCool has argued, the struggle was largely within the philosophical realm. The enemy – and it was a virtual war with casualties in the form of ecclesiastical censure – was a combination of traditionalists and ontologists who sought to engage positively Cartesian, Kantian, and post-Kantian philosophy. The former – traditionalism – argued for the accessibility of moral and religious truths through a primitive divine revelation transmitted by tradition in the course of human history. Knowledge of God mediated by language and tradition formed both faith and reason. Reason is dependent on revelation even for its own first principles. Ontologism, which in some cases was combined with forms of traditionalism, located the knowledge of God, again as the source of reason, in the metaphysics of consciousness where the idea of Necessary or Ideal Being is intuited. In both cases, the traditional Catholic distinction between reason and revelation, nature and grace, was compromised. Ecclesiastical authorities were not slow in taking notice of the perceived danger of these tendencies. Between the Congregation of the Index and the Holy Office, by midcentury propositions of traditionalism and ontologism were condemned along with rationalism. This culminated in the Syllabus of Errors promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1864. The condemnations in the Syllabus excluded positions that undermined the proper relationship between faith and reason, a significant concern of the Neo-Scholastics in their constructive efforts. In the condemnation of Augustin Bonnetty’s (1798–1879) traditionalism in 1855, the Index affirmed, “Reason can prove with certitude the existence of God, the spirituality of the soul, the freedom of man.”27 The 1861 Holy Office’s condemnation of the “Errors of the Ontologists” prohibited the following proposition:

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

383

An immediate knowledge of God, which is at least habitual, is so essential to the human intellect that without knowledge it can know nothing. It is the light of the intellect itself.28

Each of these errors – traditionalism and ontologism – compromised in some manner the integrity of reason. Either reason was subordinated to faith, as in the case of traditionalism, hence the proposition that there are some things within the purview of reason regarding a thoroughly metaphysical anthropology and the natural knowledge of God; or, on the other hand, in ontologism, reason oversteps its bounds in its assertion of an innate knowledge of God. Reason is limited by the divine mystery; such intrinsic knowledge of God can only be the fruit of supernatural revelation and the operation of divine grace. The First Vatican Council (1869–1870) called by Pius IX would enunciate that relationship in Dei Filius. The perpetual common belief of the Catholic Church has held and holds also this: there is a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only in its principle but also in its object; in its principle, because in the one we know by natural reason, in the other by divine faith; in its object, because apart from what natural reason can attain, there are proposed to our belief mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God.29

The twofold order of knowledge was the philosophical signature of NeoScholasticism. To return to Matteo Liberatore, it was his project in particular that attempted to recapture the epistemological ground necessary for the relationship between faith and reason that the Council commended, something that he had plied for nearly two decades before Vatican I. Liberatore’s philosophical battle was launched in favor of an account of the objectivity of knowledge claims that also embraced the human knower in the cognitional act. It was predicated upon Aristotelian and Thomistic principles of epistemology and anthropology, with Thomas revising and advancing Aristotle when necessary. It also preserved the integrity of each order of knowledge. If Descartes’s “turn to the subject” marks the advent of modern philosophy, the Neo-Scholastic (and especially Neo-Thomist) reaction was an attempt to argue for a more realist account of human knowing contra the innate idealism of Cartesian epistemology and those influenced by it. It affirmed the necessary materiality of the human subject and the world within the epistemological act. Sense experience and the cognitive act of abstraction are both necessary for an objective realism, considered to be the only adequate metaphysical position to support Christian faith. The act of knowledge was not dependent on the illumination of God’s innate ideas present in the mind as the ontologists would have it, or upon the conventionality of linguistic signs passed on through generations as advocated by the traditionalists (often combined with a degree of ontologism). Rather, through both the passivity of the intellect via sense impressions from the extramental world and the activity of the intellect in abstraction and judgment, one can arrive at the

384

RALPH DEL COLLE

universality of actually existing reality. The intellect’s employment of a “phantasm” or image leads to the certainty of objective knowledge by a knower who is both spiritual, as seen in these intellective operations, and material, for without the senses and really existing forms of matter (objects that are known), the affirmation of existing reality would not be possible. Since humans are sensitive-intellectual beings, knowing is constituted in both aspects of their being as demonstrated by utilization of an analytic-synthetic method.30 Liberatore presented a unitary philosophical method that brought together metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, and ethics, and militated against the idealism and implicit dualism of much post-Cartesian modern philosophy. This would be the first step in the war with modernity. By establishing a philosophical foundation for faith, it could demonstrate the integral unity of reason and faith, nature and grace, the natural with the supernatural. This unity belies any separation between the two while preserving their necessary distinctions, thereby upholding the integrity of each with a view to their finality in the beatitude of the human being in God. Liberatore’s philosophical position was confirmed by his Jesuit confrere Josef Kleutgen. Much of Kleutgen’s efforts were directed at fellow Germans who rejected Scholasticism. Indeed, there were two Scholastic centers in Germany, in Mainz and in Münster. Kleutgen spent most of his career in Rome in the General Curia of the Society of Jesus and as professor in the German College whose students studied at the Roman College, later known as the Gregorian University. His influence extended back into his homeland through his students, and most importantly in his writing, which took on criticisms of the dominant streams of Catholic theology, which were decidedly non-Scholastic and even anti-Scholastic in character. He is also believed to have been a drafter of Aeterni Patris. In his Die Philosophie der Vorzeit (published between 1860 and 1878), Kleutgen reinforced the epistemological and metaphysical claims of Liberatore. Respectively, he underscored the operation of the abstractive intellect in the act of knowledge, and took a Suarezian turn (as did many Jesuits) in his understanding of metaphysics as a science of possible essences identical with their sensible existents, all intended to undo the idealism of his theological opponents.31 However, it was his Die Theologie der Vorzeit (published between 1853 and 1865) that enunciated the theological program of Neo-Scholasticism. The titles of his works point to the former times (Vorzeit), specifically a premodern or pre-Cartesian period in Catholic theology and philosophy. Convinced that medieval Scholasticism was the mature and natural development of patristic theology, Kleutgen was not an antiquarian. He was intent on engaging and disputing modern theological trends in order to construct or reconstruct a Catholic worldview that demanded the integration of philosophy and theology (while retaining their important distinction) with scientific rigor and contemporary relevance. He employed Scholasticism to chart a course in the modern theological disciplines especially as taught in the German schools, specifically, the areas of dogmatic theology, practical theology, and speculative theology.32 He answered

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

385

the critiques of their exponents who were critical of Scholasticism and bettered them by his own constructive efforts. Georg Hermes (1775–1831) in dogmatics, Johann Baptist von Hirscher (1788–1865) in practical theology, and Anton Günther (1783–1863) in speculative theology were his representative interlocutors. He engaged them on the relevant “points of doctrine” (Lehrepunkte) in order to preserve the distinction between faith and reason, the natural and supernatural orders (nature and grace), and the knowledge appropriate to each.33 Kleutgen’s presupposition about the nature of theology that he constantly argued insisted that the truths of divine revelation were not self-evident to natural reason. Therefore, they could not constitute the basis of Christian apologetics or fundamental theology. Reason could only demonstrate the credibility of Christian faith based upon the reasonableness of believing and its moral necessity. Metaphysical truths such as God’s existence and the immortality of the soul were indeed the subject of philosophical argument and affirmation but not the revealed truths of the Trinity and Incarnation. The latter required a supernatural act of faith, the fruit of divine grace. The concern was to preserve the integrity of reason in its own sphere – this was absolutely essential to maintaining the credibility of Christianity and the possibilities of rational and moral discourse – while simultaneously preventing the overreach of reason into realms of faith with reductionist consequences. This was no philosophy of revelation, but rather an account of reason that is open to faith, and one that can demonstrate its credibility on the basis of epistemology, metaphysics, and history (as in the events of revelation). Most of all, theology was a science of faith for Kleutgen, the supernatural faith that is the fruit of grace and divine revelation. Kleutgen’s delineation of the theological disciplines was a logical and clear alternative to that of his countrymen: dogmatic theology is a matter of positive revelation and its analytic and synthetic treatment. The latter entailed the gathering of the historical sources of doctrine in scripture and tradition, especially the Church Fathers, which were then taken up in an analytic exposition of the developed doctrine as articulated by Church teachings in the register of their Scholastic maturation. The earlier dismissal of Scholastic method for its syllogistic diversions (by Hermes) and the later critique of its lack of historical consciousness were answered by Kleutgen through the utilization of clear philosophical and theological principles of Thomist provenance. Analytic and deductive operations were, in service of the faith, once delivered to the saints and developed under the guidance of the magisterial authority of the Church. It was the Tübingen school of Catholic theology that presented the greatest challenge to the reemergence of Scholasticism. In the area of practical theology, Hirscher adopted Johann Sebastian von Drey’s (1777–1853) architectonic idea of the kingdom of God. Between Tübingen and Neo-Scholastic sensibilities was a dispute over how grace is operative in the moral development of the Christian life. Both agreed on the necessity of the supernatural order but differed on the metaphysical modality of grace. Indeed the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are determinative for the supernatural life, with Hirscher positing the

386

RALPH DEL COLLE

efficient causality of the Holy Spirit’s regenerative and vivifying activity. In contrast, Kleutgen utilized the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and accident to reiterate the Scholastic and Thomist insistence that the supernatural life is a matter of an entitative infusion of grace (sanctifying grace as an accident) with its consequent operative habits in the theological virtues. The matter had to do with preserving the supernatural character of grace, certainly not denied by the Tübingen school, but contended by Kleutgen and other Neo-Scholastics as lacking in their work. As would be repeated a century later when NeoScholasticism yielded to the nouvelle théologie, arguments over whether and how the original state was already graced were the issue. Kleutgen perceived in the Tübingen emphasis on the kingdom of God as a divine idea realized in the creation and redemption of humankind a lack of distinction in the pre-lapsarian state between natural existence and original justice as a grace. A similar critique informed Kleutgen’s evaluation of Günther’s philosophy of revelation in the discipline of speculative theology. Only the supernatural light of faith leads to the knowledge of God, itself “imperfect, indirect and analogous.”34 This could not be recognition of revealed truth in the cognitional reflexivity relative to the positive data of revelation, that is, discovering something already embedded in the history of humankind through an act of primitive revelation (similar to the traditionalists). In contrast, Kleutgen’s analogical approach preserves both the incomprehensibility of God and the divine freedom in the bestowal of grace, always a supernatural event of divine favor that is not owed to nature. Nor does it prevent the contemplative and mystical graces that attend growth in sanctity as the fruit of sanctifying grace. One very much formed by Kleutgen’s thought, Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888), would develop this.

The Possibilities of Neo-Scholasticism Having studied at the Roman College, Scheeben was influenced by the Jesuit Roman School which at the time (he earned his doctorates in philosophy in 1855 and in theology in 1859) was not yet completely dominated by Neo-Scholasticism, although he was certainly influenced by Kleutgen. However, he was also influenced by Carlo Passaglia (1812–1887), Clemens Schrader (1820–1875), and Johannes Baptist Franzelin (1816–1886), all continuing the approach of Giovanni Perrone (1794–1876), who as described by Thomas O’Meara “had sought to arrange biblical, scholastic, and patristic approaches into a synthesis” in a manner that was “conservative, literal, and dogmatic but by no means shallow or reactionary.”35 This was a school that took seriously the work of the Jesuit Dionysius Petavius (also known as Denis Pétau [1583–1652]) and the Oratorian Louis Thomassin (1619–1695), pioneers in the work of positive theology. By the time he returned to Germany to teach at the Cologne Seminary in 1860, Scheeben had absorbed several trajectories in the theology of his day. Many argue that he cannot be categorized as a strict Neo-Scholastic (and certainly not a replica of

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

387

Kleutgen’s Neo-Thomism). However, his long-standing interest and position on the theology of nature and grace is best characterized as Neo-Scholastic. He simply demonstrated the heights to which one could take it. In a most accurate description, his theology has been characterized as “a lyrical scholasticism.”36 As much as the Neo-Scholastics emphasized the distinction between nature and grace, a distinction that would be controverted again in the mid-twentieth century, Scheeben demonstrated the depth to which one could take the supernatural dimension of faith as the epistemic basis for theology, and this precisely because he preserved the integrity of nature and its operative habits. Therefore, he agrees with Kleutgen that what is accessible to nature and reason ought not to be confused with supernatural revelation. Indeed one must affirm that “[a]ll natural knowledge of intellectual, religious, and ethical truths must be connected with a Divine Revelation of some kind.” However, such revelation can only be described as natural.37 Included within the scope of natural revelation are those truths concerning God and our relations with God that can be known by the light of reason. Indeed, such light is given by God but must be distinguished from the light of faith by which one apprehends positive or supernatural revelation. The latter more properly proceeds from divine grace. Scheeben was as firm as Kleutgen and other Neo-Scholastics in delimiting the scope of natural revelation in order to identify the errors of other theological positions. Theories which confound this Natural Revelation with Positive Revelation, like Traditionalism, or with the Revelation of Glory, like Ontologism, completely misapprehend the bearing and energy of God’s creative operation and of created nature itself.38

In the elucidation of nature and grace, Scheeben demonstrated the importance of the distinction not just for philosophical purposes, necessary as that was and which occupied many Neo-Scholastics. He also proved its worth for a proper understanding of grace that elevates and transforms the Christian with its fruit in the mystical union with Christ and growth in sanctity. Thus, while it may appear that the Neo-Scholastic concentration on reason would seem to accord it a certain primacy regarding theological method, and a rationalistic one at that, that was not the intent of the Neo-Scholastics. Charges of Wolffian rationalism in critiques of NeoScholasticism,39 intended to emphasize a Cartesian deductive logic, were not uncommon. However, apart from the philosophical contretemps that Neo-Scholasticism aggressively engaged in, consequences for the Christian life were also at stake. For Scheeben, a robust and spiritual account of human nature is essential to the anthropology required for his representation of the supernatural. Without the anthropological correlate to faith and reason so strongly essayed by Neo-Scholastics, the magnitude of its meaning for the theology of grace cannot be appreciated. Scheeben saw this, even if this meant that he pushed the boundaries of what some considered to the Neo-Scholastic ideal. Thus, for example, even Kleutgen could comment of Scheeben, “He talks about a supernatural logic, a supernatural

388

RALPH DEL COLLE

ontology, etc. – what reasonable sense does that have?… Although the teaching is good, I am afraid that it will confuse more heads than it will illumine.”40 Despite this reservation, Scheeben gives body to the nature-grace distinction, one that also bears fruit for the spiritual life. The “natural” is weighted with its own meaning as created nature – later to be disputed by twentieth-century critics of Neo-Scholasticism as the concept of “pure nature” – but one that directly bears on elucidation of the supernatural. In its own sphere nature is primarily to be interpreted in terms of its operations and ends.41 Nature “signifies the essence and substance, not simply as such, but with reference to life and activity, as the principle of motion, as the root and basis of the entire life.”42 Hence, in its operations of intellect and will (continuing the faculty psychology of Aquinas), a person acts in accord with the capabilities of created nature in its knowledge of truth and love of the good. This is indeed reflective of the spiritual dimension of human beings and one that can arrive at knowledge of God through created things. This natural knowledge and love of God bespeak a truly natural end, one open to and met by divine existence and presence. At the vey least, it countered the emerging tendencies of modernity and affirmed the imago Dei, which if denied can only lead to the conclusion that “[i]f godliness is extinguished in man, his nature ceases to be a true human nature.”43 For all the effort spent by Neo-Scholasticism on nature and reason, metaphysics, ethics, and a proper epistemology, Scheeben takes it into the supernatural organism of grace. The latter (in his estimation) could not take place without a firm foundation in the natural, more specifically, the operative human powers by which our end is achievable. Nevertheless, its life and power proceed from the grace offered through the God-human Jesus Christ. On the gratuity and higher powers of the latter, Scheeben is clear: “indeed, a new creation erected on the substructure of the first creation; a new establishment and foundation of a new, immensely higher life, for which no germ or seed was found in nature.”44 His elaboration embraces the interiority of classical Catholic mysticism and a pneumatological slant characteristic of the Greek Fathers, what he termed a principle of life proceeding from the uncreated Spirit. Yet he was attentive to Latin Scholastic categories; for example, what is a substantial and essential communication to Christ is communicated to us “through an accidental form and nature.”45 This lyrical Neo-Scholastic then can proceed to explore the full panoply of grace in its vital activity and in its enactment in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. And as if foreshadowing the universal call to holiness of the Second Vatican Council, Scheeben can declare, Accordingly the acts of supernatural life are all mystical. Indeed, in the present state of wayfaring there can be no acts of a higher kind than those common to all Christians.46

Not all understood this emphasis in such lyrical tones. In fact, it was quite the opposite that emerged in the critique of Neo-Scholasticism and the subsequent

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

389

reaction against it in the twentieth century. Such phrases as “new creation erected on the substructure of the first creation” portrayed grace as a superadditum, added to the powers of nature, and in some explications quite extrinsic to the interiority of the human being. This would lead to debates over the concept of “pure nature” dear to many Neo-Scholastics, all intended as we have seen to the upholding of the gratuity and supernatural character of grace. In this respect, Scheeben represents an account of grace that is both intrinsic and yet thoroughly supernatural. In effect, the debate over the characterization of Scheeben as a strict NeoScholastic or otherwise identifies what is at stake in the reception of the movement. Indeed, his strong distinction between nature and grace was one of the primary emphases of Neo-Scholasticism. At the same time, his “supernatural logic” (as described by Kleutgen) reveals a distinctive contribution to the possible outcomes of the Neo-Scholastic approach, and one that was not necessarily normative. Therefore, on the one hand, there is the metaphysical and epistemological trajectory of Kleutgen, a story delineated by Gerald McCool. On the other hand, Scheeben exploits the dogmatic-mystical angle, also present in the movement. Yet it would not dominate its most common educational outcome as embodied in seminary “scholastic manuals,” often accused of theological abstractness and pedagogical aridity.47 In anticipation of twentieth-century developments in Catholic theology, Kleutgen and Scheeben represent two different trajectories, both with roots in Neo-Scholasticism and both informed in part by the nature-grace distinction. Kleutgen delimited the aspirations of a Romantic theology that expected both too little and too much of natural reason. It was his task to demonstrate that the limits of reason far exceeded Kantian prospects by constructing a realist metaphysics and epistemology open to the supernatural. Divine revelation would remain as the gratuitous foundation for human beings destined for the fullness of life under grace. As McCool has remarked, Kleutgen’s leadership in the NeoThomist effort to construct a unitary philosophy and theology led to pluralism within Neo-Thomism itself. Later Gilsonian and Maritainian Thomists could take comfort in his opposition to subjective starting points in his critiques of Descartes and Kant. At the same time his attention to St. Thomas’ metaphysics of selfconsciousness would give rise to the development of Maréchalian transcendental Thomism and its greatest theological expositor, Karl Rahner.48 The somewhat natural logic of Kleutgen was countered or balanced by the more explicit “supernatural logic” of Scheeben. While he could elucidate like Kleutgen the anthropological basis for the supernatural life of grace – he devotes an entire chapter in Nature and Grace to the “Spiritual Nature of Man”49 – Scheeben’s heart and mind were taken up with the supernature and its effects in the Christian life. In doing so he develops a robust pneumatology reminiscent of Petavius and uncharacteristic of Neo-Scholasticism in general. However, one must recall that while the theology of the Holy Spirit was more prevalent in the Tübingen school, especially in the theology of Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838), it was Leo XIII,

390

RALPH DEL COLLE

the patron of Neo-Scholasticism, who issued a papal encyclical on the Holy Spirit (Divinum Illud Munus, 1897). Therefore, it is also interesting that Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), the great Swiss Catholic theologian of the next century, devoted considerable space to Scheeben in the first volume of his Herrlichkeit, describing him as “the greatest German theologian to date since the time of Romanticism … [stating rather interestingly that he] brought the Thomism of the schools to Germany from Rome, but he expounded it in a way which made it possible for the concerns of the previous age to come to life again, even if in a different form.”50 While critical of Scheeben’s account of natura pura as a “selfenclosed order of life,” he nevertheless understood that for Scheeben grace cannot be “simply a modal ‘supplement’ to nature.” Rather, it is “the world of God himself.”51 If we then consider Scheeben as pointing toward another, distinctly non-Scholastic trajectory in twentieth-century Catholic theology, it is best to quote him in order to demonstrate how the dominant Neo-Scholastic concern has been taken up and transcended: The Holy Spirit animates and moves the spiritual man otherwise than He vitalizes and moves merely natural beings. In the latter He evokes their own proper life; but in His sanctifying work He communicates His own proper life.52

Conclusion The story of nineteenth-century Neo-Scholasticism cannot be appreciated unless one takes a view that extends beyond even the “long nineteenth century” (1789– 1914). Much of the impact of the triumph of Neo-Scholasticism would not be felt until the beginning of the twentieth century and beyond into midcentury. At the most authoritative level, the influence of Neo-Scholasticism was felt in Dei Filius, promulgated at the First Vatican Council (1970), with the assistance most likely of the expertise of Joseph Kleutgen and Johannes Baptist Franzelin.53 The Constitution upheld the necessity for divine revelation even as it affirmed that humanity is able to come to the knowledge of God through the natural light of reason from the evidence of created things. Revelation, however, assures this possibility “even in the present condition of mankind,” with “facility, with firm certitude and with no admixture of error”; its necessity determined not by this – for in itself this is not beyond the scope of human reason – but by the infinite goodness of God that humanity should attain its supernatural end (chapter 2).54 Dei Filius, similar to the Neo-Scholastics, maintained an intricate balance between faith and reason. The latter provides a rational basis for faith even to the extent of positing “exterior proofs of revelation, viz., divine facts,” especially miracles and prophecies. However, these are joined “to the interior helps of the Holy Spirit,” faith itself being “a supernatural virtue … inspired and assisted by the grace of God” (chapter 3).55 Affirming the harmony between faith and reason with no contradiction between them, it

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

391

also clarifies the limits of reason relative to faith. It is worth quoting in full. In it, natural analogy is affirmed for theological understanding even as it is exceeded by the supernatural mystery of faith. Nevertheless, if reason illumined by faith inquires in an earnest, pious and sober manner, it attains by God’s grace a certain understanding of the mysteries, which is most fruitful, both from the analogy with the objects of its natural knowledge and from the connection of these mysteries with one another and with man’s ultimate end. But it never becomes capable of understanding them in the way it does truths which constitute its proper object. For divine mysteries by their very nature so excel created intellect that, even when they have been communicated in revelation and received by faith, they remain covered by the veil of faith itself and shrouded as it were in darkness as long as in this mortal life “we are away from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:6–7)56

Following the Council, the exercise of papal magisterial initiatives would also continue with Leo XIII’s successor, St. Pius X (1835–1914), whose pontificate extended from 1903 to the beginning of the First World War. His encyclical On the Doctrine of the Modernists (Pascendi Dominici Gregis; 1907), combined with his condemnation of modernists theses in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907) and the antiModernist Oath of 1910 (Sacrorum antistitum), insured the dominance of Neo-Scholasticism against what they perceived as problematic theological tendencies. The promotion of Neo-Thomism in particular reached a climax when the Sacred Congregation of Studies issued a Decree of Approval of Some Theses in the Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas and Proposed to the Teachers of Philosophy in 1914. Twenty-four in number, they touched upon ontology, cosmology, psychology, and theodicy. Certainly, this was the apex of the effort to arrive at a unitary philosophical-theological synthesis to articulate the faith over against the world and a hostile modern culture. Criticism of Neo-Scholasticism abounded in the next century, enunciated as its lack of historical consciousness, its dry and abstract style more concerned about proposing theses than genuine theological inquiry, and its lack of connection to spirituality and the pastoral issues of the age. Even from within their own ranks, interpretations of Aquinas would vary, from distinguishing between Thomas himself and his later commentators, to a plurality of philosophical sensibilities with the advent of various Thomisms. It was especially the ressourcement of the nouvelle théologie of the mid-twentieth century that would unseat its dominant position in Catholic theology and eventually (if not suddenly) its disappearance after Vatican II. Nevertheless, the establishment in Rome by Leo XIII of a commission (the Editio Leonina) to edit critically the text of Aquinas’s writing would reinforce a historical approach to his corpus; and the continued disputes over nature and grace (with continued magisterial intervention as in Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis of 1950) would lead to a revivification of Catholic theology with effects still influential in postconciliar Catholic theology.

392

RALPH DEL COLLE

Notes 1 The Congregation of Seminaries and Universities in 1938 published it with the following subtitle: “The Establishment of Christian Philosophy in the Tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, in Our Catholic Schools, 4 August 1879.” As reported by Yves Congar, A History of Theology, trans. and ed. Hunter Guthrie, S. J. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 186 n. 4 – the Congregation published correlative documents of this period in support of the intent of the encyclical as described in the subtitle. 2 Pope Leo XIII, “Encyclical Letter on the Restoration of Christian Philosophy Aeterni Patris,” August 4, 1879 (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, n.d.), 3. 3 Leo XIII, “Encyclical Letter,” 3. 4 Ibid. 5 Leo XIII states that “the Catholic philosopher will know that he violates at once faith and the laws of reason if he accepts any conclusion which he understands to be opposed to revealed doctrine”; ibid., 9. 6 Ibid., 18 7 Ibid., 13. 8 Ibid., 14. 9 M. De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New: An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy Medieval and Modern, trans. P. Coffey (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1907), 3. 10 Hans Küng, Theology for the Third Millennium, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Anchor, 1988), 188. 11 John Courtney Murray, S. J., The Problem of God (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), 114. 12 De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 57. 13 Ibid., 59. 14 Murray, The Problem of God, 114. 15 Gerald McCool, The Neo-Thomists (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 1994), 1–40. 16 McCool, The Neo-Thomists, 5. 17 Congar, A History of Theology, 58–114. 18 David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Random House, 1962), 266. Knowles’s judgment on Augustianism was that it could never separate itself from its theological programmatic, as proved to be the case with Aquinas’s contemporary Bonaventure. See 36, 244f. 19 From “The Praise of Folly” in The Essential Erasmus, trans. John P. Dolan (New York: Mentor, 1964), 144. 20 Thomas J. A. Hartley, Thomistic Revival and the Modernist Era (Toronto: University of St. Michael’s College, 1971), 17f. 21 Hartley, Thomistic Revival, 2–7. 22 Ibid., 11. 23 McCool, The Neo-Thomists, 28–29. 24 Ibid., 36–38. 25 Hartley, Thomistic Revival, 22–29. 26 Gerald A. McCool, S. J., Nineteenth Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 145.

NEO-SCHOLASTICISM

393

27 D 1650. Quoted from John F. Clarkson, S. J., et al., eds., The Church Teaches: Documents of the Church in English Translation (Rockford, Ill.: Tan, 1973), 18. 28 D 1659. Clarkson et al., The Church Teaches, 20. 29 D 1795, DS 3015. Quoted from J. Neuner, S. J., and J. Dupuis, S. J., eds., The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, rev. ed. (Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 1982), 45. 30 See McCool, Nineteenth Century Scholasticism, 145–158. 31 Ibid., 212. 32 I follow McCool’s account of Kleutgen’s work in Nineteenth Century Scholasticism, chaps. 8–9, 167–215. 33 Ibid., 172. 34 Ibid., 207. 35 Thomas Franklin O’Meara, O. P., Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860–1914 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 69. 36 Aiden Nichols, O. P., Scribe of the Kingdom: Essays on Theology and Culture, Volume I (London: Sheed & Ward, 1994), 213. 37 Joseph Wilhelm and Thomas B. Scannell, A Manual of Catholic Theology: Based on Scheeben’s “Dogmatik, Vol. I Second Edition” (New York: Benzinger, 1899), 4. This is a condensed version in English translation of Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, originally published in three volumes between 1873 and 1887. 38 Wilhelm and Scannell, A Manual of Catholic Theology, 5. 39 Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a philosopher of the Enlightenment known for his “dogmatic rationalism,” perhaps the most important German philosopher between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804). 40 J. Kleutgen, Briefe aus Rom (Münster, 1865), 130f. (September 4, 1892) – quoted in O’Meara, Church and Culture, 55. 41 Scheeben acknowledged that working definitions of terms delineating the natural and supernatural had been worked out already by Kleutgen, but not with the end that Scheeben intended. His observation was that Kleutgen’s concern was polemical: good reason to consider Scheeben’s constructive project as an example of the possibilities of Neo-Scholasticism. See Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Nature and Grace, trans. Cyril Vollert, S. J. (New York: Herder, 1954), 19, n. 1. 42 Scheeben, Nature and Grace, 20f. 43 Ibid., 97. 44 Ibid., 102. Or, perhaps even more clearly, “Thus it is clear from every point of view that supernature really transcends nature and that nature itself is elevated and sanctified; supernature does not arise from our essence, but bestows on us a sort of new existence, a higher nature.” Ibid., 114. 45 Ibid., 107. 46 Ibid., 221f. 47 Numerous theologians in the twentieth century (including many of the great ones) have decried their theological formation in the Neo-Scholastic manual tradition. One quote can suffice. Hans Urs von Balthasar characterized this time in his life as that of a “young man languishing in the desert of neo-scholasticism.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: In Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), 89. 48 McCool, Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism, 214f.

394

RALPH DEL COLLE

49 See chap. 5 of the text. 50 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), 104. 51 Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 106. 52 Scheeben, Nature and Grace, 190. 53 McCool, Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism, 218–221. 54 D 1786, DS 3005. Quoted from Neuner and Dupuis, The Christian Faith, 41. 55 D 1789–1790, DS 3008–3009. Ibid., 42. 56 D 1796, DS 3016. Ibid., 45f.

Bibliography Boileau, D. A. (ed.). Cardinal Mercier’s Philosophical Essays: A Study in Neo-Thomism. Leuven: Peeters, 2002. Cessario, Romanus, O. P. A Short History of Thomism. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2003. Hartley, Thomas J. A. Thomistic Revival and the Modernist Era. Toronto: University of St. Michael’s College, 1971. McCool, Gerald A., S. J. Nineteenth Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method. New York: Fordham University Press, 1989. O’Meara, Thomas Franklin, O. P. Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860– 1914. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Scheeben, Matthias. Nature and Grace, trans. Cyril Vollert, S. J. New York: Herder, 1954.

CHAPTER 19

The Bible and Literary Interpretation Stephen Prickett

From Religion to Religions If, as Peter Harrison has cogently argued, the word “religion” only acquired its modern meaning of a particular systemized code of belief and practice in England at the end of the seventeenth century—as the breakdown of the medieval synthesis and the religious upheavals of the sixteenth-century Reformation allowed people, for almost the first time, to see that more than one such system could exist—only then could “a religion” be perceived as one system among several that could be studied as it were objectively, from the outside. Only then did the word acquire its plural form.1 In that sense, our concept of “religion”, a product of pluralism, is itself only about three hundred years old. But pluralism was not merely a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem; it involved re-writing the nature of the entire narrative. What remained unresolved by the end of the eighteenth century was the question of whether, and in what form, a Christianity deprived of an authoritative Bible could survive at all. Though, as always, individuals might be skeptical about details, the grand narrative itself (for all its Platonic foundations) had been essentially unironic. The truth had been divinely revealed through the Incarnation of Christ, the inspired words of Scripture, and the teachings of the Church. Much might still be hidden, but that was no reason to suspect the permanence and validity of God’s Word. What was destroyed in two centuries of acrimonious theological debate, the higher criticism, and the scientific revolution was the certainty of revealed knowledge itself. In the post-Romantic world, whatever interpretations of the Bible might replace the traditional synthesis were to be either blindly fundamentalist, abrogating human reason to absolute divine revelation, or fundamentally ironic.

396

STEPHEN PRICKETT

Irony and the Higher Criticism “Irony” is a word much misused and much misunderstood. There is nothing new in the idea that biblical narrative is fraught with unspoken and “hidden” meaning (eiron). For many early biblical commentators it was evidence for secret, often figurative or allegorical, meanings to the text.2 For later, Romantic and postRomantic readers, such as Kierkegaard and Erich Auerbach, who both wrote on the Akedah (J’s account of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac), it consists of a curiously concentrated and dense narrative, stripped of what Auerbach calls “foreground” detail, and that for Kierkegaard resists all interpretation and re-telling.3 For Kierkegaard, following Friedrich Schlegel, irony was a feature of all great literature. For him Socrates “tunneled under existence,” producing “an ironic totality, a spiritual condition that was infinitely bottomless, invisible, and indivisible.”4 Nor has the discovery of irony in biblical narrative been confined to critics; many of the greatest literary ironists, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and Thomas Mann, have looked to the Bible for inspiration.5 Yet the claim that by the end of the eighteenth century the ordinary reader was faced with the stark choice between fundamentalism and irony as modes of biblical interpretation nevertheless needs some further justification. Can a reading be ironic if the reader is unaware of the fact? The modern, Kierkegaardian meaning of the word, though in fact dating from the 1840s, was hardly in general use in the nineteenth century. We must look not for the word, but the practice—and what we find increasingly in the eighteenth century is not just a new critical theory of biblical interpretation—the so-called higher criticism— but also a new way of reading any text.6 We find it, for instance, in the very origins of the higher criticism itself. Robert Lowth’s Oxford lectures on The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753) were not intended in any way to be revolutionary. Much of his framework seems to be derived from the work of Richard Simon in France in the 1680s.7 Lowth published, as he had lectured, in Latin, and he was not even translated into English until 1778. An able Hebrew scholar, he had been elected to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in May 1741, and since he was obliged to start lecturing almost at once without time to prepare by consulting the normal academic sources, he seems to have turned to his theme of the Psalms almost by default. Nevertheless, for an age still accustomed to typological and figural interpretations, his first lecture struck a quite new note: He who would perceive the peculiar and interior elegancies of the Hebrew poetry, must imagine himself exactly situated as the persons for who it was written, or even as the writers themselves; he is to feel them as a Hebrew … nor is it enough to be acquainted with the language of this people, their manners, discipline, rites and ceremonies; we must even investigate their inmost sentiments, the manner and connexion of their thoughts; in one word, we must see all things with their eyes,

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

397

estimate all things by their opinions: we must endeavour as much as possible to read Hebrew as the Hebrews would have done it.8

Instead of trying to deduce four- (or seven- or twelve-) fold meanings divinely encoded within the sacred texts, Lowth was, almost for the first time, trying to understand the biblical writers as people of their time within what was known of their social framework. The result was to transform both biblical criticism and, what was entirely unforeseen, the status of poetry and literature as well. For Lowth, the prophets and poets of the Old Testament were one and the same. [I]t is sufficiently evident, that the prophetic office had a most strict connexion with the poetic art. They had one common name, one common origin, one common author, the Holy Spirit. Those in particular were called to the exercise of the prophetic office, who were previously conversant with the sacred poetry. It was equally part of their duty to compose verses for the service of the church, and to declare the oracles of God.9

The Hebrew word “Nabi,” explains Lowth, was used to mean “a prophet, a poet, or a musician, under the influence of divine inspiration.” The word “Mashal,” commonly used to mean a “poem” in the Old Testament, is also the equivalent of the (Greek) word translated in the New Testament as “parable.” In other words, the parables of Jesus, so far from being an innovation, were an extension, by the greatest of the biblical “poets,” of the existing Hebrew prophetic tradition. Lowth’s second great discovery was nothing less than what he believed to be the construction of Hebrew verse itself. Whereas all European poetry had depended upon such aural effects as rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration, no such forms could be discovered in Hebrew verse – even in the Psalms, which were obviously intended to be songs. Nor could contemporary Jews explain the lost art of Hebrew poetry. Lowth was now able to explain in his lectures that the poetry of the ancient Hebrews had depended primarily upon a feature which he called “parallelism.” The Correspondence of one verse, or line, with another, I call parallelism. When a proposition is delivered, and a second subjoined to it, or drawn under it, equivalent, or contrasted with it in sense; or similar to it in the form of grammatical construction; these I call parallel lines; and the words or phrases, answering one to another in the corresponding lines, parallel terms.10

The origins of parallelism, Lowth argued, like the origins of European poetry, lay in the previous oral tradition – in this case, in the antiphonal chants and choruses we find mentioned in the Old Testament. He cites, for instance, I Samuel 18:7, where David, returning victorious from battle with the Philistines, is greeted by women chanting, “Saul hath slain his thousands,” to be answered by a second chorus with the parallel, “And David his ten thousands.”11 Lowth distinguishes no less

398

STEPHEN PRICKETT

than eight different kinds of parallelism, ranging from simple repetition to echo, variation, and contrast and comparison – as in the particular case cited, where the implications were not lost on Saul, who promptly tried to have David assassinated. In other words, for Lowth, irony lay right at the structural center of Hebrew poetry. If, before, dramatic irony had been limited to such obvious moments as Nathan’s denunciation of David, it was now possible to see biblical poetry, and much of biblical prose as well, in terms of dramatic and ironic narrative. Moreover, in linking Jesus’ parables with the prophetic metaphors of the Old Testament, Lowth is further encouraging a sense of ironic and hidden meanings in the New Testament texts. In the Preliminary Dissertation to his New Translation of Isaiah, written in 1778, some thirty years after his groundbreaking Lectures, Lowth insists that his quest for scholarly accuracy is grounded in what he calls “the deep and recondite” readings of Scripture. The first and principal business of a Translator is to give us the plain literal and grammatical sense of his author; the obvious meaning of his words, phrases, and sentences, and to express them in the language into which he translates, as far as may be, in equivalent words, phrases, and sentences…. This is peculiarly so in subjects of high importance, such as the Holy Scriptures, in which so much depends on the phrase and expression; and particularly in the Prophetical books of scripture; where from the letter are often deduced deep and recondite senses, which must owe all their weight and solidity to the just and accurate interpretation of the words of the Prophecy. For whatever senses are supposed to be included in the Prophet’s words, Spiritual, Mystical, Allegorical, Analogical, or the like, they must all entirely depend on the Literal Sense.12

This is not so much a stress on the literal sense for its own sake13 as a belief that all figurative interpretation must rest on an accurate text. In discussing Isaiah 35:5–6 (“Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing…”), Lowth is at pains to link it with its standard New Testament antetype: Matthew 9:4–5 (“that the lame walked and the deaf heard”). Indeed, his commentary suggests more a typical medieval fourfold reading than simply the kind of two-level typology more common in eighteenth-century commentaries. To these [Matthew’s words] the strictly literal interpretation of the Prophet’s words direct us…. According to the allegorical interpretation they may have a further view: this part of the prophecy may run parallel with the former, and relate to the future advent of Christ; to the conversion of the Jews, and their restitution to their land; to the extension and purification of the Christian Faith; events predicted in the holy Scriptures as preparatory to it.14

Such apparent conservatism would hardly ring alarm bells, yet it is hard to think of any secular term except “dramatic irony” for what Lowth here sees as conventional biblical typology.

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

399

Once again, changes in the meanings of words reflect changes in sensibility and outlook. The first recorded usage of the word “drama” to describe the Bible in this new narrative sense comes from a sermon of John Sharp, Archbishop of York, published in the year of his death, 1714, where he refers his congregation to “the great drama and contrivances of God’s providence.” Not surprisingly, Gilbert Burnet records that Sharp was a great lover of poetry and the theatre, and was wont to say that the Bible and Shakespeare had made him Archbishop.15 It is significant also that this new meaning of the word “drama,” to describe nontheatrical narratives, coincides with the introduction of the theatrical metaphors “scene” and “scenery” to describe landscapes. Lowth’s work inaugurated a critical revolution.16 The Latin text of his Lectures was quickly republished in Göttingen (1758) with a new preface and extensive notes by the pioneer biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis, and was partially translated into German by C. B. Schmidt in 1793. Lowth’s translation of Isaiah was translated into German the year after its English publication in 1778. They were to prove vital catalysts in German historical criticism of the Bible. For such figures as Johann Eichhorn, Gotthold Lessing, Hermann Reimarus, and Johann Herder, the Bible had to be read not merely as one might read any other book, but also specifically as a record of the myths and aspirations of an ancient and primitive Near Eastern tribe. Accounts of God’s appearances and other miracles were to be understood primarily as constituents of a particularly powerful and eclectic mythology. Contemporary research had begun to reveal how much of Genesis in particular had been appropriated from older Egyptian, Babylonian, and Near Eastern religions. What meaning there was in such stories was moral and developmental rather than historical – illustrating what Lessing, in the title of one of his best-known books, had called The Education of the Human Race (1780). If such narratives were to be given a different status from those, say, of ancient Greece or Rome, it was for their “moral beauty” or the profoundly ethical nature of their teachings. For the English-speaking world, however, the most thoroughgoing historical analysis of biblical sources came not from Germany (a source of few translations during this period) but from France. C. F. Volney’s Ruins of Empires (1791) was a work of massive syncretistic scholarship, drawing in many cases on the work of the German scholars mentioned above. But Volney was also an expert in his own right. In 1781 he had gained an international scholarly reputation by his study of Herodotus’ chronology. His next book, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypt (1787), had confirmed his status as an Orientalist and earned him a decoration from Catherine the Great. To prepare for that expedition, he had spent some time in a Coptic monastery and learned Arabic. Like Herodotus, his first subject, he had been overwhelmed by his firsthand experience of the historical difference of past cultures from his own culture and society. For Volney, all the world’s major religions could be traced by way of Persia to a common origin in the sun cults of ancient Egypt: “Jews, Christians, Mahometans, howsoever lofty be your pretensions, you are, in your spiritual and immaterial system, only the blundering followers of

400

STEPHEN PRICKETT

Zoroaster.”17 Understandably, it was an immediate success in radical circles. No less than three editions of two different English translations (both of which Volney thought were unduly moderate in tone) were brought out in 1795–1796, and it was a major influence on figures as different as Tom Paine, William Godwin, and Godwin’s son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley. During the earlier part of the 1790s, the critical ideas of Michaelis, Reimarus, Lessing, Eichhorn, and even Herder had begun to filter into progressive circles in Britain, often through Unitarian circles. There were even British scholars of international repute, such as the Scottish Catholic priest Alexander Geddes. It is significant that Geddes’s work, like that of Richard Simon a century before, was initially seen by his superiors as a new weapon in the conservative armory against Protestantism rather than something that might destabilize the whole subject.18 By the mid-1790s, however, war against revolutionary France had led to an anti-Jacobin backlash. Unitarianism, with its dangerous radical associations, became politically suspect. Joseph Priestly, the internationally famous scientist, philosopher, and political theorist, and perhaps the best-known Unitarian in England, was forced to flee to America after his house and laboratory were burned by a loyalist mob in 1794. Paine’s own attack on religion, The Age of Reason (1793), lost him popularity and his natural position as leader of the radical reformers, and he was forced to follow suit. Other influential academics suspected of Unitarian sympathies, such as William Frend (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s tutor at Cambridge) and Thomas Beddoes at Oxford, were expelled from their fellowships. Because of its political associations, the higher criticism was generally deemed to be unpatriotic, Jacobin, and unchristian, and for the next thirty years was virtually ignored in Britain. Not until the 1820s was the intellectual climate again sufficiently favorable for the introduction of continental ideas. Indeed the priorities and standards of the time were revealed by the fact that when, in 1823, the future Tractarian leader and Oxford Professor of Divinity Edward Bouverie Pusey wanted to learn about Lutheran theology, he could find only two men in Oxford who knew any German.19 Cambridge was marginally better off. Herbert Marsh, who had translated Michaelis’s Introduction to the New Testament (1793–1801) and who had prudently returned to Leipzig for a while after the persecution of Frend, became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1807. Julius Hare, who became a Fellow of Trinity in the 1820s and, before becoming rector of Hurstmonceaux, was tutor to both John Sterling and F. D. Maurice, had more than 2,000 books in German. Meanwhile, however, Lowth’s biblical criticism had triggered a quite different aesthetic revolution in Britain. His Lectures not merely opened up a new historical approach to the context of the biblical writings, but also allowed the poet to claim biblical precedents for a new status: not as a decorator or supplier of “supernumerary ornaments,” but as a prophet, seer, and mediator of divine truth. Hugh Blair, first Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh University and, in

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

401

effect, the first professor of English literature in the world, devoted a whole chapter of his lectures (1783) to summarizing Lowth. They were one of William Wordsworth’s main sources for his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. But not merely did Christopher Smart and William Cowper, and William Blake and Wordsworth, cast themselves in a biblical rôle unimaginable, for instance, to Alexander Pope or Thomas Gray, but also the models and canons of literary taste had undergone a corresponding shift. By and large, the principal literary models in 1700 were classical; by 1800 they were more likely to be biblical. Lowth anticipates and sets the agenda for Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction by implicitly rejecting the stilted conventions of Augustan poetic diction, and praising instead the “simple and unadorned” language of Hebrew verse, which gained its “almost ineffable sublimity” not from artificially elevated diction, but from the depth and universality of its subject matter. But Lowth’s pioneering work had another even less foreseeable consequence. Because Hebrew poetry relied on parallelism rather than the rhymes and rhythms of European verse, it was, Lowth claimed, best translated not into verse, but prose.20 As critics such as Hugh Blair were quick to point out,21 this meant that whereas European and even classical poetry was extremely difficult to translate into another language with any real equivalence of tone or feeling, the Bible was peculiarly, and, by implication, providentially, open to translation. This observation had a further unforeseen consequence: that of blurring the traditional distinctions between prose and verse. To speak of a prose piece as “poetic” could now be much more than a metaphor. Nor was this shift in critical theory dependent on the writer’s own religious beliefs. If Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were all Christians of a kind, Shelley had been expelled from Oxford for his atheism. He nevertheless centers his Defence of Poetry (1821) on Lowthian principles. “Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets; a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.” “The distinction between poets and prose writers,” he continues, “is a vulgar error.” “Plato was essentially a poet” – so were Moses, Job, Jesus, Isaiah, Francis Bacon, Raphael, and Michelangelo. To “defend” poetry he extends his definition to embrace the whole of literature – and, indeed, art in general. Following Lowth, the prophetic function of the artist has become more important than any particular linguistic form. Common to Romanticism right across Europe at this period is a new concept of “literature” as of inherent value in itself over and above its ostensible subject. The OED lists this value-added variant as the third, and most modern, meaning of the word, defining it as “writing which has a claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect” – adding the rider that it is “of very recent emergence in both France and England.” If Lowth’s work had had the unintended effect of making irony central to reading biblical texts, it was no less influential in transforming the status of secular poetry, and of blurring the distinctions between prose and verse. His stress on the literary power and “sublimity” of the Bible was to help (though not inaugurate)

402

STEPHEN PRICKETT

new ways of appreciating it as an aesthetic work. Though the new secular aesthetic status of the written word has been attributed to many origins, there is no doubt of the part played by the Romantic reading of the Bible. Thus in Germany, what was virtually a new subject, “aesthetics,” had come into being following Kant’s hint (it is little more than that) in the third Critique that the gap between pure and practical reason might be bridgeable by art, and had become a central plank of Romanticism.22 But there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that this new value attached to good writing, whether prose or verse, was already gaining ground in both Britain and Germany, before either Lowth or Kant, as an extension of the Protestant approach to reading the Bible. It is possible to follow a progression whereby the intense self-searching and self-constructing relationship to the text fostered by the personal Bible study of Protestantism was subsequently transferred first to the study of the “book” of Nature in seventeenth-century science, then to history, and then, finally, with the rise of the new art form, the “novel,” in the eighteenth century, to the reading of secular fiction as “literature.”23 Not least among the many ironies of critical history is the way in which, just as a literal historical interpretation of the Bible was becoming increasingly impossible for an educated readership, it was to re-gain much of its old status in a secularized form, as “literature.”

New Kinds of Narrative: The Bible as Novel When once a man begins to build a system, the very gifts and qualities which might serve in the investigation of truth, become the greatest hindrances to it. He must make the different parts of the scheme fit into each other; his dexterity is shown not in detecting facts but in cutting them square.24

F. D. Maurice’s 1854 attack on systematizers is the most outspoken example of a tradition of Romantic thought going back at least as far as Coleridge. It represents the final rejection of any attempt at reconstructing any orthodox synthesis. A “system,” together with its outward political and ecclesiastical expression, a “party,” was for him a mental and spiritual straitjacket, permitting only predetermined gestures toward pre-defined goals. It is the vehicle of the secondhand, inhibiting change and stultifying creativity. In contrast, what Maurice (following Coleridge) called “method” was the pre-condition of all firsthand experience. Without it, impressions and intuitions were alike random and disorganized. “To me,” he wrote, “these words seem not only not synonymous, but the greatest contraries imaginable: the one indicating that which is most opposed to life, freedom, variety; and the other that without which they cannot exist.”25 The Bible afforded the perfect example of the contrast. The systematizer “is tormented every page he reads with a sense of the refractory and hopeless materials he has to deal with,” whereas the disinterested reader who does not approach it with pre-conceptions finds a unity and meaning in the very diversity of its contents.

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

403

It is “organic,” providing a “principle of progression” by which we move from the known to the unknown, and without which the infinite possibilities of the new remain unexplored because they are inaccessible. Maurice’s dislike of the idea of a theological system was not just a matter of semantics. Probably more clearly than anyone of his age, he had grasped the degree to which the grand narratives of the past were an anachronism. No external system could now legislate for the depth and complexity of the interior life of an individual. In the past, systems could only be conceived in terms of an externalized synthesis embracing both physical and moral/religious worlds. William Paley’s elaborate arguments from design may be seen as the last gasp of such a unified synthesis. In its place was a new way of perceiving and experiencing the world that was essentially internal: at once organic, creative, and aesthetic. For Maurice, the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Sir Walter Scott had helped to break down the old distinction between “external” and “internal” worlds, showing how far each is dependent on the other. The ambiguities revealed in human perception reveal corresponding ambiguities in what we mean by “nature” itself. When we speak of “laws” in literature, in philosophy, or in nature, are we referring to qualities inherent in the objects themselves, or to constructs of the human mind? “Is the man of genius the author of them, or does he merely perceive them and adapt himself to them?”26 The question was itself the product of the outmoded empiricist habit of thought, and no longer meaningful. It has been found impossible to affirm either position, to adopt either form of language as the sufficient and exclusive one. Those who endeavour to do so, are soon seen to contradict themselves; some unconscious phrase asserts in one sentence what was denied in the previous one. It seems to follow that the law of imagination is a law of fellowship or intercommunion with nature….27

To ask, and reject, such questions is to begin to look at the world in a new way. Any attempt to describe our relationship with our environment is distinguished by a necessary and truthful inconsistency, which must be recognized as one of the foundations of human experience. At the simplest level, this tension is present in the literal absurdity of every metaphor; at the opposite pole, for Maurice, in the mystery of the Incarnation itself.28 From the beginning, it has been the domain of the aesthetic and literary. Almost unnoticed, a quite new kind of narrative had made its appearance. Though written prose stories about everyday life had existed for millennia in China, Japan, and even ancient Egypt, the genre was sufficiently new in English to earn it simply the name of “novel.”29 That it first rose to prominence in England, and only later spread first to France and then to Germany, seems not unconnected with the fact that the new religious pluralism had also first taken root there (an exception to this being, of course, Catholic Spain, in which Cervantes’s Don Quixote was a well-known example). The novel was essentially a pluralistic art form. If Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists had begun the exploration of

404

STEPHEN PRICKETT

an ironic counterpoint of arguments and beliefs, they worked almost invariably with aristocratic, and usually foreign, settings.30 The novel continued this dialogic tradition, but in a middle-class and domestic context. Significantly it was the first art form created as much by women as by men, and what evidence we have of eighteenth-century readership suggests an overwhelmingly female audience. Hardly surprisingly, it was popular, low status, and frequently denounced by moralists. But, as the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has shown, the novel opens up a quite different kind of consciousness, in which the inner world can play as great a part, if not a greater part, than external events, and a wide variety of viewpoints can be accommodated. His word for this new, anarchic, unorthodox, sprawling babel of voices is “heteroglossia.”31 The novel, as a genre, does not deploy a particular narrative technique; it has a whole armory of them at its disposal. Serious moral argument can rub shoulders with specious self-serving, and both with irony and satire. The wild, outlandish, and miraculous can rub shoulders with the ordinary, trivial, and mundane. Anything goes. It is, above all, the art of juxtaposition. During the eighteenth century, there occurred in England one of those momentous sea changes in reading that permanently altered the way in which books, whether sacred or secular, were understood and interpreted. It was probably not until the extraordinary success of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719 that one becomes aware of how the new art form, the so-called novel, was altering not merely standards of realism but also, less obviously, the way in which other kinds of narrative were being read and understood.32 Increasingly, the Bible – and, in particular, the Old Testament – ceased to be read as though it spoke with a single omniscient dogmatic voice, and began instead to be read as dialogue, or even a heteroglossia, with a plurality of competing voices. At the same time, what had been universally accepted as an essentially polysemous narrative, with many threads of meaning (typological, anagogical, allegorical, and moral), was narrowed into a single thread of story, which was almost invariably interpreted as being “historical” – and, needless to say, unreliable history at that. Typology had been a key element in the original Christian grand narrative, permitting the Christian appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures. By relating every event in the Old Testament to a corresponding one in the New, even the most intractable material could be shown to have a “Christian” content.33 For Lowth, Isaiah 35 finds its fulfillment in Matthew 9. Similarly, not only is Jesus the “second Adam,” but also the Adam of Genesis typologically foreshadows the “new man” which is in Christ. Erich Auerbach argues convincingly that far from being merely a hermeneutic fashion, typological interpretation of the Bible had been an essential ingredient in its becoming a world religion.34 For a French Romantic, such as Chateaubriand, however, writing in 1802, typology was no longer adequate to convey the human qualities of biblical narrative. What mattered was the confluence of intellect and passion: in short, the

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

405

delineation of character. The Bible excels not merely in morals, but also as literature. Indeed, without its aesthetic lead, modern literature could not exist. Christianity is, if we may so express it, a double religion. Its teaching has reference to the nature of intellectual being, and also to our own nature: it makes the mysteries of the Divinity and the mysteries of the human heart go hand-in-hand; and, by removing the veil that conceals the true God, it also exhibits man just as he is. Such a religion must necessarily be more favourable to the delineation of characters than another which dives not into the secret of the passions. The fairer half of poetry, the dramatic, received no assistance from polytheism, for morals were separated from mythology.35

To see the impact of such character-driven, novelistic biblical criticism on traditional typological modes of biblical interpretation, one need look no further than two commentaries on the story of Jacob and Esau, one from an early eighteenthcentury volume, and the other an early nineteenth-century account of the same incident. This Mysterious History throughout, represents to us in all parts of it Jesus Christ, cloathed in the outward appearance of a Sinner, as Jacob here was in that of Esau. It is also an admirable Figure of the Reprobation of the Jews, who desired nothing but the good things of the World; and of the Election of the Church, which (like David) desires but one thing of GOD, and requests but one Blessing. We must have a care (as S. Paul saith) not to imitate Esau, who having sold his Birth-right to Jacob, and desiring afterwards, as being the Eldest, to receive the Blessing of his Father, was rejected, without being able to persuade his Father to revoke what he had pronounced in Favour of Jacob, notwithstanding his entreating it with many Tears. For as he had despised GOD, GOD also despised his Cries and Tears, as not proceeding from a sincere Repentance, nor from a true Change of Heart.36

In the second passage, author, character, and plot are paramount: Jacob, in obedience to his mother, acts against his own conscience. Our Reason will show us that these are not things we should imitate in Isaac, Rebekah, and Jacob; therefore no remarks are made upon them by the sacred writer of their history. What we are particularly to observe here, is, that GOD made the faults of these three persons contribute to bring about his own good purposes. GOD knew beforehand what they would do; he also knew that Jacob, though he would do many wrong things, would keep from idol worship, and reverence his Creator, and bring up his family in the true religion; and that Esau on the contrary would marry among idolators, and depart from the right way; and GOD, possibly for this reason, ordained that Jacob rather than Esau should be the head of the great nation through which all the families of the earth should be blessed.37

This is not typological but literary criticism. God is the supreme novelist, and our task is to work out the moral significance of the characters He has created.

406

STEPHEN PRICKETT

Yet one senses a certain unease. The author, Mrs. Trimmer, has not had the advantage of reading her Bakhtin, knew nothing of heteroglossia, and had not read Chateaubriand, but she clearly suspects that this is not altogether the kind of morally improving narrative she was accustomed to producing in her own (numerous) religious tracts. Stripped of typological gloss, the Bible is turning into a novel before her eyes, and she is not entirely sure it is the kind of novel she is going to approve of. But typology was not so much swept aside by the novel as incorporated by it. Walter Ong has asked the interesting question of why Jane Austen was the first novelist to move beyond a loose episodic construction and create a tightly structured plot in which every event has its meaning not just in relation to where it occurs, but also throughout.38 Much of the answer lies in the changes in eighteenth-century ways of reading the Bible and to the disappearing habit of typological reading. For instance, in chapter 10 of the first book of Mansfield Park, the various protagonists approach the iron gate that leads from the wilderness to the main park in the grounds of Sotherton, the house of Rushworth, Maria Bertram’s fiancé. Since Maria has set her heart on going through it, Rushworth goes to get the key, while Henry Crawford, who comes up moments later, persuades Maria to squeeze round the gate.39 In what follows, each member of the party acts in such a way as to foreshadow their eventual approach to marriage. Mr. Rushworth, the legal owner of the estate, and the legally betrothed fiancé of Maria, goes to get the legal “key,” but this, like the marriage it represents, takes time – time enough for the unscrupulous Crawford, Maria’s seducer, to suggest an easier route to instant gratification and release. Julia, Maria’s sister, who later elopes, simply scrambles across the ha-ha in their wake, while Fanny, ever the passive if virtuous heroine, remains on the right side, waits for Edmund, the hero (whom she is eventually to marry) – and complains of a headache. It is part of the novel’s spiritual topography that Mary Crawford’s attempts to dissuade Edmund from being ordained are while the party is strolling in the part of the garden technically known as “the wilderness,” and on a “serpentine” path wandering from the main axis. Though literary critics use the word “symbolism,”40 this is, of course, however ironic, old-fashioned biblical typology of the sort that Parson Austen’s daughter was accustomed to hearing every Sunday from the pulpit. The fourfold senses of the text are as much present here as they might be in any traditional commentary on Genesis – however much the spirit behind them may have changed. In encountering the gate, the literal sense of the narrative is complemented by the typological: each character foreshadows his or her later sexual behavior, and consequently their ordained fate, within the novel. Morally we see that waiting for legal marriage, as the “key” to future happiness, though it takes more time and denies immediate gratification, is the correct course. In medieval typology the anagogical sense normally was taken to foreshadow a future state beyond time – the type of a spiritual paradise. Here what is being decided is who is to eventually inherit the “estate” itself – and the double meaning, now archaic, of both “land” and “position” is significant. By eloping with Crawford, Maria

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

407

violates at once both propriety and property,41 thus forfeiting not merely her social status but also (in jilting Rushworth) Sotherton; Fanny gains not just Edmund’s love, but also (spiritually, as the wife of the incumbent) Mansfield Park itself, even the name of which (“Mans-field”) in the novel has a clearly allegorical reference to the human condition. Such passages, frequent not merely in Austen42 but also in George Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray,43 and Anthony Trollope, illustrate the great paradox of the Bible in the nineteenth century: that at the very moment when it was seemingly losing both historical and even moral authority with biblical scholars and philosophers, it was permeating as never before the literature and imaginative thought of the time. Thus Coleridge’s famous approach to the Bible – “I take up this work with the purpose to read it for the first time as I should any other work…” – revolutionary as it was in England for its time, was soon to become a commonplace. Indeed, just how pervasive such literary assumptions had become by the end of the century can be seen in the parallel development in biblical studies of what became known as “the documentary hypothesis.” This was essentially a literary theory of authorship. What had hitherto been seen as the word of God was analyzed stylistically and thematically to show how it had been created by a number of identifiably different writers. German scholars such as Julius Wellhausen and Gerhard von Rad produced a whole cast of supposed redactor/authors, known to us only by the initial letter of their characteristic style. There is “J,” the “Jahwist,” so called because of the centrality of “Yahweh,” the unspoken and unspeakable name of God, composed in the Hebrew only of consonants (Ywh). There is “P,” the “priestly” source, more concerned with the cult and rituals that came to govern every aspect of Hebrew behavior. For some there was also “E,” the “Elohist,” who characteristically refers to God in what may be a plural form: the “Elohim.” Then there is “R,” the “redactor,” who supposedly some time after the return from the Babylonian captivity “wrote up” these various putative and now lost sources to produce our present text of Genesis. Of these, “J” is assumed to be the earliest and most “primitive” – dating possibly from the time of David and Solomon, around 1000 BCE. The fact that this hypothesis came from within the academic theological establishment tended to conceal the degree to which the whole critical enterprise of biblical studies was now in transition from its traditional didactic and philosophic bases. The minutiae of what was now known as “textual scholarship” (as opposed to the “higher criticism”) rested to an unacknowledged degree on essentially subjective aesthetic judgments. This did not invalidate its conclusions, which were prophetic of what Richard Rorty was to call the “aesthetic turn” of twentieth-century thought. The final stage in this move was to come in the late twentieth century with Harold Bloom’s Book of J, which takes the literary criteria of the documentary hypothesis to its logical (if deliberately provocative) conclusion by making “J” into one of the great authors of world history, a master of irony to be ranked with Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare.44 She was, he tells us, a noblewoman, probably connected with the court circle of David and Solomon.

408

STEPHEN PRICKETT

It is only with a work such as Bloom’s, which leaves the reader uncertain of the degree of irony involved, that we can look back on the full historic processes of appropriation that led up to it.45 New hermeneutic theories characteristically present themselves as an organic development of the previous tradition. Indeed, organicism is so much a part of the romantic appropriation and theorizing of the Bible as an aesthetic metatype that it is easy to miss the way in which the process also involved wrenching it free of traditional ecclesiastical control and, in effect, privatizing it. One can see the process beginning even in Sterne’s sermons, but with the Protestant reading of the Bible as novel-like narrative becoming widespread in Britain and Germany by the nineteenth century, a quite new kind of reader–text relationship was developing as part of the new print culture. Romantic theory, with its stress on the personal and singular quality of all experience, relating it to particular times and occasions, could quickly elevate the normal subjectivity of reading into what amounted to what has been described as “a series of raids on the absolute,” in which moments of special intuition or grace – “spots of time” in the Wordsworthian terminology – seemed to offer the reader at any rate the possibility of unmediated spiritual experience. Kant’s limited noumena of “God,” “freedom,” and “immortality,” in the hands of later Romantics, burgeoned into a whole range of potential private mystical experiences. In extreme cases, like that of Blake, we find texts removed from the public sphere of ecclesiastical discourse, not to be de-mystified, but in effect to be re-mystified. To the degree that institutional control was retained, it tended increasingly to be in the hands of universities rather than churches. Regina Schwartz has noted that “just as the Reformers’ displacement of medieval exegesis tells a story about shifting power,” so too does the contemporary displacement of interpretation from specifically denominational centers to the universities.46 She is, of course, right: but to call it “contemporary” is to misread the history of that process. In Europe it was already well advanced by the nineteenth century. The career of Schleiermacher, and his subsequent appropriation by Wilhelm Dilthey, illustrates very clearly how official biblical exegesis in Germany was passing from church to university. In England, Anglican control of the two main universities meant that the process was delayed until the mid-nineteenth century, but the result in the end was much the same.47 Even coming from Catholic France, it is significant that the most innovative piece of Romantic theology, Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity (1802), is, in effect, a lay sermon. Though Chateaubriand proclaims not merely his orthodoxy but also his conservatism, the very imperialism of his claims for Christianity over history and art alike has the curious effect of making Christianity sound primarily like a theory of culture rather than a theology in the traditional Catholic sense. Like all successful appropriations, this shift in control has been made to seem with hindsight a natural evolutionary process. But that should not blind us to the extent of the transformation. From being a book of uncertain provenance, doubtful authority, and dubious veracity, the Bible had, in the space of a generation,

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

409

been re-appropriated by the Romantics as a source of cultural renewal, aesthetic value, and literary inspiration. It provided a model of the literary transcendent, by which art might bridge the abyss between sense perception and mystical intuition. Even more significantly, the Bible had, in the process, become a metatype, the representative literary form, and the paradigm by which other works were to be understood and judged. Though, like all other human constructs, in its constituent parts it was no more than a rubble of fragments and ruins, it was also increasingly seen in this overarching sense as the “type” of wholeness – and so a theoretical counterpart to the essential incompleteness of the fragment. The effects of this on other, secular, writing were to be profound.

Notes 1 Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2 See Stephen Prickett, ed., Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 3 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowerie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941; reprint, New York: Everyman, 1994), 6–18; and Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). 4 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. with intro. and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 19. 5 For the irony of Sterne, Austen, and Mann, see Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6 Prickett, Origins of Narrative, 117–131. 7 See Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, “England and France in the Eighteenth Century,” in Prickett, Reading the Text, 137–147. 8 Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory (1787), 1:113, 1:114. 9 Lowth, Lectures, 2:18. 10 Ibid., 2:32. 11 Ibid., 2:53. 12 Ibid., lxviii. 13 A long tradition of Reformation divines had stressed the importance of the literal meaning: e.g., William Perkins: “there is only one sense and that is the literal”; William Perkins, The Art of Prophecying (1592). 14 Robert Lowth, New Translation of Isaiah (1778), 2:232. 15 Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time (1715), iii, 100. 16 For a fuller discussion of the implications of Lowth’s work, see Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 17 C. F. Volney, The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (London, 1795; reprint, London 1881), 83.

410 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

STEPHEN PRICKETT

See R. C. Fuller, Alexander Geddes (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983). David Newsome, The Parting of Friends (London, 1966), 78. Lowth, Lectures, 1:71f. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Poetry and Belles Lettres, 2 vols. (1783; Reprint, Edinburgh, 1820), 2:270–271. See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); and Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997). See Prickett, Origins of Narrative; and Wesley A. Kort, Take Read: Scripture, Textuality and Cultural Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1966). F. D. Maurice, Lectures in Ecclesiastical History of the First and Second Centuries (Macmillan 1854), 222; cited by Alec Vidler, F. D. Maurice and Company (London: SCM Press, 1966), 22. F. D. Maurice, Kingdom of Christ (1838), 1:272–273. Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, 1:181. Ibid. Ibid., 1:183. Interestingly, the word used in both French and German, roman, is the same as that used for medieval verse romances, as in the fourteenth-century classic Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun and Guillome de Loris, and implies a much higher degree of continuity. Similarly, the Czech Marxist critic Lucás places the novel as a continuation of the classical verse epic. For Shakespeare’s consistently aristocratic bias, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). The obvious exceptions to this generality are Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Yarrington’s A Yorkshire Tragedy, and the anonymous Arden of Faversham. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972). See Prickett, Origins of Narrative, chap. 3. See, for instance, G. W. H. Lampe and K. G. Woollcombe (eds.), Essays on Typology (London: SCM Press, 1957); and, for its continuation in the nineteenth century, George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (London: Routledge, 1980). Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” trans. R. Mannheim, in Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959), 28. Auerbach, “Figura,” 232. Richard Blome, ed., History of the Old and New Testaments Extracted from the Sacred Scriptures, the Holy Fathers, and Other Ecclesiastical Writers… 4th. impression (1712), 31. See also Prickett, Origins of Narrative, chap. 1. Mrs. (Sarah) Trimmer, Help to the Unlearned in the Study of the Holy Scriptures, 2nd ed. (1806), 32–33. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), 144–145. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 99. For instance, Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Macmillan, 1986), 160–162. As Coleridge points out, the separation in meaning (or desynonymy) of these two words was comparatively recent; see Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), 1:61.

THE BIBLE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

411

42 See Prickett, Origins of Narrative, chap. 5. 43 See, for instance, Marion Helfer Wajngot, The Birthright and the Blessing: Narrative as Exegesis in Three of Thackeray’s Novels, Stockholm Studies in English 91 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 2000). 44 Wajngot, The Birthright and the Blessing, 25. 45 For a fuller discussion of this process, see Prickett, Origins of Narrative. 46 Regina Schwartz, ed., The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), introduction. 47 See Stephen Prickett, “Church and University in the Life of John Keble,” in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism (Wantage: Ikon Press, 1992), 208–210.

Bibliography Bowie, Andrew, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1997. Knight, Mark, and Thomas Woodman (eds.), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Prickett, Stephen (ed.), Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Prickett, Stephen, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Schwartz, Regina (ed.), The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

CHAPTER 20

Skeptics and Anti-Theologians George Pattison

The dawn of the nineteenth century saw atheism becoming an increasingly common option amongst both cultured despisers of religion and followers of nascent working-class movements, and by 1900 unbelief had become more or less normalized across wide areas of culture and society. In this context, the term “anti-theologians” is taken to apply to a group of thinkers, artists, and writers who are not to be identified simply in terms of not believing in the Christians’ God. Perhaps there were many in the nineteenth century who, lacking or having abandoned any personal belief, nevertheless felt there to be some good for individuals and societies in religious belief and/or practices. Perhaps there were also many unbelievers for whom this was purely a matter of opinion on which reasonable men (and, occasionally, women) could agree to differ. But the term antitheologian suggests something much stronger: for the anti-theologian, it was not enough to disprove the existence of God; what was demanded was the complete destruction of all existing practical and theoretical forms of religion, and their replacement by new forms better suited to real human interests. Note that this suggests a kind of positive or constructive element in the anti-theological agenda: that the anti-theologian is not merely an anti-theologian, but also an anti-theologian. This does not mean that he is closer to or more sympathetic to theology than the straightforward atheist. On the contrary. The anti-theologian believes that simply disproving God’s existence is never going to be sufficient to get rid of the pernicious phenomenon of religious belief. Belief is so engrained in the Western psyche that it will only be eliminated when its real bases have found a truer or more adequate form of expression. The anti-theologian not only wants to get rid of the old religion, but also wants to inaugurate a new religion, as implied in the title of David Friedrich Strauss’s 1872 work, The Old Faith and the New. Religion is not just to be dispensed with, but also to be replaced – and it is this combination of a fierce antagonism toward existing religion with

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

413

revolutionary re-inventions of humanity’s ultimate goals and values that marks out the anti-theologian, as opposed to the simple agnostic or atheist. Inevitably, there will always be scope both for refining this characterization of the anti-theologians and for debating just who might be included in any short list of significant anti-theological figures. Much recent theology has been pleased to invoke rather all-inclusive genealogies of nihilism,1 and many figures in the history of ideas who might once have seemed to offer a complex middle ground for debating central issues in religious belief (Kant, Schleiermacher, or Hegel, for example) are now revealed (and reviled) as “evil nihilists.” Now it is certainly possible (and perhaps even fruitful) to consider whether any particular thinker assumes or proposes philosophical claims or strategies that must eventually undermine belief. But in many cases – such as those just mentioned – this is not stated as a philosophical or religious aim. On the contrary, each of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel claimed that their work was congruent with and even offered an authentic interpretation of historical Christianity. In the case of Schleiermacher, this claim was widely accepted by a significant ecclesiastical community. Authorial intention and the process of reception do not, of course, decide issues of content, yet I suggest that the true anti-theologian knew that he was an anti-theologian, made it quite explicit that he was so, and was perceived by his contemporaries as being so. Psychological, social, and metaphysical revolt is explicit, and however it is more closely defined, the tone of the anti-theologian is from the beginning that of Lord Byron, taking the part of Cain, or of Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Queen Mab” (1813), when, speaking in the voice of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew2 (who had supposedly cursed Christ on his way to Golgotha and, as a result, been condemned to walk the earth until the Second Coming), he declares, …my soul, From sight and sense of the polluting woe Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer Hell’s freedom to the servitude of Heaven.

What Christianity had represented as a divine punishment is affirmed as a freely chosen destiny, a preference for “Hell’s freedom” as opposed to heaven’s “servitude,” and thus as an explicit act of defiance against both the Christianity and its God. Of course, philosophers and theologians are, for the most part, more cautious in their language than poets, and the issue as to how to interpret their positions is somewhat complicated by the presence of censorship in many European countries, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. Was it possible for a Kant or a Hegel to state their “real” thought, if that ran against the will of the religious establishment?3 Hegel is perhaps an especially interesting and important case to ponder with regard to the definition of the true “anti-theologian.” He is an unavoidable figure in the history of anti-theology since the anti-theology of the Left Hegelians, from

414

GEORGE PATTISON

Strauss to Karl Marx, seems to have been initiated by elements of his philosophy. Yet it can be claimed not only that Hegel’s system was congruent with historic Christian doctrine but also that it offered a defense of Christianity as “the absolute religion.” As critics from Kierkegaard onward have done, it may seem easy to accuse Hegel of revising Christianity in such a way as to do away with the transcendent God. Yet few theologians have so consistently thought through the implications of the Incarnation for the interpretation of selfhood, history, culture, and society as did Hegel, and few theologians in the West have been so explicitly and consistently Trinitarian. Although largely neglected in recent histories of ideas, so-called Right Hegelians such as Philip Marheineke, Karl Rosenkranz, and J. E. Erdmann were productive in revising the theological syllabus in the light of Hegelian methods and insights, and the roll call of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians who have been positively influenced by the German philosopher is not inconsiderable. From the point of view of the inquisitors who find traces of nihilism in all but the chosen few, this is not enough to secure Hegel’s rehabilitation, but it indicates that broad generalizations and over-hasty categorizations always need to be substantiated by careful textual and contextual work. Hegel will therefore continue to be a significant point of reference in this essay, but I shall not be counting him as one of the anti-theologians since his work lacks that explicit contestation of Christianity that was apparent in, for example, Shelley. Arguably, Hegel may have been a false friend to Christianity – but he did not seek to be its enemy. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is another figure who might be considered an anti-theologian.4 He was the self-styled “Founder” of a new “religion of humanity” that was proposed as an explicit and thoroughly worked-out alternative to Christianity, including a calendar of festivals and a program of rituals. In Comte’s new religion, “humanity” is made the explicit object of worship and the supreme good is the future development of the human community in the light of positivist science. He is clearly post-Christian, yet the “Library of the Proletariat” that he includes in his Positivist Catechism includes not only classical literature and philosophy alongside key works of modern science, but also the Bible, the Koran, Augustine’s City of God and Confessions, and later Christian writings by Thomas à Kempis, Blaise Pascal, and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, inclusions that would have scandalized a Friedrich Nietzsche. 5 In these and other ways (e.g., the sentimentality of his idealization of the feminine), Comte’s system lacks the hard edge that we have heard in Shelley and will find again in the German and Russian thinkers with whom we shall largely be concerned.6 However, it should be emphasized that such judgments will always be provisional and contestable, and the examples I have selected for further discussion can only be regarded as representative and not exhaustive. A larger treatment would need to include not only, for example, SaintSimon and Comte, but also the English Utilitarians and the various anti-theological uses of Charles Darwin that developed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as well as attending to further expressions of anti-theology in literature and the arts, from Charles Baudelaire to Henrik Ibsen and beyond.

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

415

Arthur Schopenhauer Although Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was ignored by the contemporary academic world and did not get taken up by a “movement,” he provided a visionary alternative to Christianity. Like other German Idealists, especially J. G. Fichte, Schopenhauer saw reality as deriving from an act of absolute will. However, whereas Fichte’s absolute will was characterized by rationality and manifested itself in a “moral world-order,” Schopenhauerian will is blind, without goal or purpose. His world is nothing but the aimless production of teeming and mutually destructive life forms consuming each other in an endless struggle to affirm their illusory existence as independent or “real” beings. The only basis for valuing one set of experiences more than another is not whether they are in accord with a moral world-order, but whether they are more or less painful. Schopenhauer saw himself as building on the achievement of Immanuel Kant. But whilst other German Idealists claimed to demonstrate the essential congruence between human beings’ representations of the world and the inner reality of the world-in-itself, Schopenhauer argued that the philosophers’ belief in the harmony of truth and being was an intellectual will o’the wisp, a hypothesis without demonstrable basis in reality. Kant, he said, had been right in seeing the principle of causality as an a priori way of ordering experience that does not itself derive from experience. Yet Kant had been wrong to cling to a residual belief in a thing-in-itself, a reality transcending human mental life that was congruent with our criteria of reason and goodness. Having recognized causality as belonging exclusively to representation (and not being an observed feature of the external world), it was self-defeating of Kant to want to find a “cause” or ground for representation outside representation itself. But Schopenhauer is not a skeptic. On the contrary, he claims that we have direct experience of the in-itself. But this in-itself is not a rational ground underlying our ideal construction of the world: it is simply will. “When we look within, we always find ourselves willing,”7 and this will that we encounter when we “look within” is nothing but the universal will. But the will is not the “cause” of events in the world of our experience. The phenomena of the world are objectifications of the will, but they are not “caused” by the will; rather, they are simply the way in which we see the will manifest itself to us. In a characteristically striking image, Schopenhauer states, Just as a magic lantern shows many different pictures, but it is only one and the same flame that makes them all visible, so in all the many different phenomena which together fill the world or supplant one another as successive events, it is only the one will that appears, and everything is its visibility, its objectivity; it remains unmoved in the midst of this change. It alone is the thing-in-itself; every object is phenomenon, to speak Kant’s language, or appearance.8

416

GEORGE PATTISON

The will does not consciously or deliberately will to “appear” in one or another form, since it lacks any kind of intentionality. Individual beings – animal, mineral, vegetable, or human – are merely individual objectifications of this one will. Whatever hierarchy of causes or values links these beings within the world as we experience it is nothing but a product of our minds. We thus see the force of the title of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation: that the one world is knowable either as will or as representation, but neither will nor representation explains the other, nor, indeed, do they together explain “the world,” which is simply a pointless and endless magic-lantern show. Schopenhauer says that “when we look within,” we “see” the will – but how do we “see” it? The image of the magic lantern might seem to suggest some kind of mystical vision of an inner light or power, but Schopenhauer’s point is more straightforward. Our direct contact with the universal will is simply the way in which we exist as corporeal beings, as bodies: the body, he writes, “is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception.”9 This means that the act of will is individualized and manifested as just this individual body, just this ensemble of pre-rational drives, passions, and positive or negative responses to the other bodies or to its own internal body states that it encounters in its world. To the extent that these bodily experiences are pleasurable, we value them as “good”; to the extent that they cause us pain, we call them “bad” or “evil.” We are now in a position to see why Schopenhauer’s philosophy is generally regarded as pessimistic. For precisely because we experience the one universal will under the conditions of being individuated bodies in a world of manifold individual bodies, we only ever experience reality in an illusory, fragmented, and even conflicted way. We imagine that we should pursue the interests of the human species against those of other species, or our own interests as opposed to those of other people. Yet however hard we try, we can never really fulfill “our own” interests since doing so involves suppressing or thwarting those of the other beings to whom we imagine ourselves opposed – but these “other beings” are in reality also manifestations of the one will that we ourselves are. My healthy meal is the death of the animals or plants that end up on my plate, but I myself, animals, and plants are all expressions of the one, universal will divided against itself. It is therefore inevitable that experiences of pain and unfulfilled longing predominate over anything that might resemble pleasure or satisfaction. As Schopenhauer put it in one of his darker sayings, “The world itself is hell, and human beings are in one respect the souls in torment and in another the devils therein.”10 Or, somewhat more poetically: Every time a man is begotten the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations. Every individual, every human apparition and its course of life, is only one more short dream of the endless spirit of nature, of the persistent will-to-live, is only one more fleeting form, playfully sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time; it is

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

417

allowed to exist for a short while that is infinitesimal compared with these, and is then effaced, to make new room. Yet, and here is to be found the serious side of life, each of these fleeting forms, these empty fancies, must be paid for by the whole will-to-live in all its intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and finally made manifest. It is for this reason that the sight of a corpse suddenly makes us serious.11

Schopenhauer believed that this vision of life was fundamentally identical with that of Indian philosophy and especially Buddhism.12 As he understood it, Buddhism too taught that the wretched life we experience in the world is ultimately an illusion brought about by the self-deceptions of unfulfillable desires and that our best aim is therefore to liberate ourselves by relinquishing our individuated ego-consciousness. Denial of the will to live is thus the highest value of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Such denial can never be completed while we live in the body, which is perpetually moved by its instinctual will to life, but “we … who consistently occupy the standpoint of philosophy” know that the world and all its phenomena are without substance and are, in the end, nothing; and that we shall by no means evade the consequence that, with the free denial, the surrender, of the will, all those phenomena also are now abolished. That constant pressure and effort, without aim and without rest … the multiple forms succeeding one another … the whole phenomenon of the will; finally … time and space, and … subject and object; all these are abolished with the will. No will: no representation, no world.13

In the meantime, the chief solace of those still gripped by the will to live is provided by art, because art abstracts from our real bodily desires, and opens a space of contemplation in the midst of life in which we experience only the “mere form without the material.”14 As for Christianity, Schopenhauer claims that his teaching is in accordance with “the great truth which constitutes the kernel of Christianity,” namely, “the doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will).”15 Although Jesus Christ personifies the denial of the will-to-live, neither “his mythical history in the Gospels, [nor] the probably true story lying at the root thereof ”16 comprises more than forms determined by the needs of the unthinking multitude. Historic Christianity is merely one more form of the objectification of the will and, as such, merely one more form to be renounced by those who have achieved insight into the inner contradiction of existence. Schopenhauer neither belonged to nor started a school. Working outside the university system, he poured sarcasm on those, like Hegel, who taught a merely “school” philosophy.17 He would subsequently influence the development of the study of “oriental” religions by such figures as Paul Deussen, but his philosophy did give intellectual coherence to Late Romantic aestheticism, and served to justify the cultivation of a “religion of art” as a radically alternative source of metaphysical solace for those finding the teachings of the Christian churches too

418

GEORGE PATTISON

burdensome for their modern minds – a tendency of which both Richard Wagner and the young Nietzsche were, for a while, representative.

The Hegelian Left In turning to the Hegelian Left, we come to a set of closely related anti-theologies that are of a very different kind from that of Schopenhauer, and to a group of thinkers who were all very much aware of each other, whether through personal acquaintance or publications, and conscious of themselves as a “movement.” The ambiguity of Hegel’s legacy has already been noted. Yet although they were important in their own time, the success of the Marxist version of the history of ideas has largely airbrushed them out of the picture. As Friedrich Engels put it in his study, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, the true line of philosophical development ran through “Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach,” until “out of the dissolution of the Hegelian school … there developed still another tendency, the only one which has borne real fruit. And this tendency is essentially connected with the name of Marx.”18 Today it is recognized that the picture is far more complex than Engels depicts it.19 But leaving open the question as to which (if any) of the Hegelians was the most authentic interpreter of the master, we turn to the key moments in this wave of anti-theology that would prove fateful not only for intellectual history, but also for some of the great political movements of modern times. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1873) began his career as a theologian, and his 1835 work The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, although it curtailed his advancement within the Church, would prove to be one of the few theological works of modern times that can without exaggeration be said to have been epochal. This was not simply on account of the way in which Strauss’s methodological thoroughness set a benchmark for subsequent biblical criticism (even if later critics arrived at very different conclusions). What alternatively inspired or scandalized Strauss’s readers was an attitude that he himself described in the preface as “the internal liberation of the feelings and intellect from certain religious and dogmatical presuppositions,” adding, “If theologians regard this absence of presuppositions from his work as unchristian, he regards the believing presuppositions of theirs as unscientific.”20 Probably only a minority of Strauss’s readers have followed him through the fine detail of the fourteen hundred pages of the original edition, and much of its impact can be credited to the lengthy introduction, in which he sets out his “mythical point of view.” He presents this as continuing the developments in biblical criticism seen in the naturalistic and rationalistic approaches of the Enlightenment period (the former “explaining away” miracles and other supernatural elements, and the latter ascribing to them a purely moral significance). For Strauss, the presence of mythical elements – whether historical, philosophical, or poetical – meant that no reliability could be attached to the overall narrative unit of which it was a

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

419

part. Moreover, although his predecessors had reached seriously revisionist conclusions with regard to important elements in the Old Testament, Strauss now extended the critical project to the New and, crucially, included all elements of Messianic belief under the rubric “myth.” Thus, whereas the rationalist could understand stories of Christ feeding the multitudes as resulting from the moral example of Jesus sharing his food and thus encouraging others to do likewise, Strauss sees in them merely the reflex of the belief that Jesus was the Messiah and therefore must have performed appropriate Messianic signs that (in this case) paralleled the feeding of the Israelites in the wilderness.21 Yet Strauss does concede a certain truth to the Messianic idea, namely, as the imaginative expression of the “speculative idea,” and he concludes his book with a “speculative Christology” that aimed “to re-establish dogmatically that which has been destroyed critically.”22 What this means is that the Messianic myth found in the New Testament is now to be understood as a symbol for the idea of the unity of the divine and human; but, unlike in the Messianic myth itself, this is not found in an individual human life but is the unity of the human race as a whole with the divine. “Humanity” is thus the obverse of divinity, and the myths and tales of the Gospels are no more than parables of what humanity as a whole can be. As Strauss asks rhetorically, And shall we interest ourselves more in the cure of some sick people in Galilee, than in the miracles of intellectual and moral life belonging to the history of the world – in the increasing, the almost incredible dominion of man over nature – in the irresistible force of ideas, to which no unintelligent matter, whatever its magnitude, can oppose any enduring existence?… Our age demands to be led in Christology to the idea in the fact, to the race in the individual: a theology which, in its doctrines on the Christ, stops short at him as an individual, is not properly a theology, but a homily.23

In 1840 Strauss produced a two-volume Dogmatics that, far from moderating the stance he had taken in The Life of Jesus, made it clear that he regarded the idea of God as existing externally in any sense at all as reflecting a pre-scientific view of the world and being appropriate only to “human beings as immediate or as not yet thoroughly formed by reason.”24 Reason and science, however, know that the absolute is only to be conceived as the absolute meaning of an immanent natural and historical process. Yet Strauss remained essentially idealistic: the idea of divine humanity would, he believed, propel humanity forward to the next phase of its development. Such idealism was vigorously rejected by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Like Strauss, Feuerbach early on abandoned conventional Christian ideas of immortality, as evidenced in his 1830 Thoughts on Death and Immortality. It was, however, his 1841 work, The Essence of Christianity, that spelled out the radical understanding of religion that made him both a significant figure in the history of ideas and, for a while, a household name. The basic message of The Essence of Christianity is that “the secret of theology is anthropology,” or “religion is the relation of man to his own nature.”25 Inherent

420

GEORGE PATTISON

in such epigrammatic statements (characteristic of Feuerbach’s assertive style) is a theory of projection: that when human beings talk about God or other transcendent beings or supernatural events, they are merely projecting human experiences and desires onto a (non-existent) other world. But why and how might such projections come about? Feuerbach’s answer involves analyzing the nature of consciousness. He takes this to be a distinctive attribute of human beings, since an animal may be “conscious of himself as an individual – and he has accordingly the feeling of self as the common centre of successive sensations – but not as a species.”26 Consciousness in the full sense is consciousness of oneself as a member of the species, that is, consciousness of oneself as a member of the human race, a part of humanity. Religion is simply this consciousness of humanity “made objective – i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.”27 Feuerbach does not, of course, think this has always been understood. On the contrary, it is only now that we have become able to distinguish between the imaginative forms in which consciousness depicts this universal human nature and their pan-human reality. Yet from humanity’s earliest beginnings, the history of religion reveals an ever closer approximation to the truth of selfconsciousness, and, as this history has progressed, less and less is attributed to God, and more is claimed by human beings as their own. At the same time, the attributes of God that are most emphasized become more and more recognizably human. Not surprisingly, the doctrine of the Incarnation plays a key part, since it shows that “Man was already in God, was already God himself, before God became man, i.e., showed himself as man. How otherwise could God have become man?”28 No less importantly, God is revealed in the Incarnation as a God of love – or, as Feuerbach says, Love conquers God…. And what sort of love was that? another than ours? than that to which we sacrifice life and fortune? Was it the love of himself ? of himself as God? No! it was love to man. But is not love to man human love?… Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God.29

Love is, indeed, absolutely central to Feuerbach’s vision. Early on in The Essence of Christianity, he somewhat conventionally states that human beings have three distinctive attributes: reason, will, and “the heart.”30 These “are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them; they are the constituent elements of his nature, which he neither has nor makes, the animating, determining, governing powers – divine, absolute powers – to which he can oppose no resistance.”31 But even if these powers are all essential to humanity, it is clear that Feuerbach gives a special emphasis to love, as when the penultimate chapter climaxes in a veritable hymn to love:

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

421

A loving heart is the heart of the species throbbing in the individual. Thus Christ, as the consciousness of love, is the consciousness of the species. We are all one in Christ. Christ is the consciousness of our identity. He therefore who loves man for the sake of man, who rises to the love of the species, to universal love, adequate to the nature of the species, he is a Christian, is Christ himself. He does what Christ did, what made Christ Christ.32

It is important to add that, for Feuerbach, “love” was not simply an ideal. His philosophy was avowedly materialistic, and he understands love as developing through the concrete, carnal love of men and women. Love “is the subjective reality of the species, as reason is its objective reality.”33 This materialism is also illustrated in his notes on baptism and communion, where he affirms the value of celebrating the material values of, for example, washing and eating. These physical functions are precisely the human truth of the sacraments that must be rescued from its theological distortion. Distinguishing his own project from that of Hegel, Feuerbach insists, “The real in its reality or taken as real is the real as an object of the senses; it is the sensuous…. Only a sensuous being is a true and real being.”34 Thus Feuerbach counsels the thinker, “Think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad,”35 and sees in this affirmation of sensuous reality the reason why his thought (“the new philosophy”) differs, as he says toto caelo, from Hegelianism, the culminating point of “the old philosophy.” Yet Feuerbach’s bold affirmation of sensuousness and his insistence on the distinction of his thought from that of Hegel did not convince all his contemporaries. A particularly singeing attack came from the pen of Max Stirner36 in the book The Ego and Its Own (1844). Whatever Feuerbach’s claims, says Stirner, the fact of the matter is that his thought is still excessively theological. All he does is simply move words around: “To God, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name ‘our essence’. Can we put up with this, that ‘our essence’ is brought into opposition to us, that we are split into an essential and an un-essential self? Do we not go with that back into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished from out of ourselves?”37 My essence, Stirner says, is simply me, this concrete, unique individual that I am: “I am neither God nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me.”38 To understand oneself in the light of some presumed “essence” or an abstraction such as “humanity” is to be “possessed” – precisely in the sense of spirit possession. “Look out near or far, a ghostly world surrounds you everywhere,” he warns his readers.39 Even Feuerbach’s hymn to love “is nothing more or less than a new – religion.”40 But all of these “spooks” and ghostly “ideals” are mere products of the false consciousness of “the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (combats his egoism) … [and] looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does it all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism will not come off him.”41 Even “freedom” is, in the end, just one more ideal.

422

GEORGE PATTISON

Stirner, for his part, recommends that we accept our intrinsic and unavoidable egoism, and urges his reader to recognize how things really are: “you take yourselves as measure and judge over all. You gladly let freedom go when unfreedom, the ‘sweet service of love’, suits you; and you take up your freedom again on occasion when it begins to suit you better…. Why will you not take courage now to make yourselves really the central point and the main thing altogether? Why grasp in the air at freedom, your dream? Are you your dream?”42 Law, morality, religion, and even the cult of “criticism” practiced by the Hegelian Left are all likewise assigned to the dream world of ghosts and spooks. Only “if I no longer serve any idea, any ‘higher essence’, [only] then it is clear of itself that I no longer serve any man either, but – under all circumstances – myself. But thus I am not merely in fact or in being, but also in my consciousness, the – unique.”43 Stirner’s vision is literally idiosyncratic. Hesitating as to whether to impound it or not, the Leipzig censors eventually decided that The Ego and Its Own was “too absurd” to merit such a step.44 Yet Marx and Engels devoted over three hundred pages of The German Ideology to ridiculing Stirner’s position. Why did this “absurd” apologia for utter individualism merit such attention? In part, it must be because Stirner’s book – in this respect, like Feuerbach’s – touched on crucial aspects of Marx and Engels’ own developing theory of communism. Sharing Feuerbach’s repudiation of idealism and affirmation of sensuous reality as the ineluctable context of human thinking and acting, Marx and Engels nevertheless see his account of human being as essentially ahistorical. He [Feuerbach] does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society…. Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree … was … only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.45

Consequently, the alienation of human beings from their true essence cannot be overcome by merely humanizing our religious ideas. Rather, it depends on reordering – to be precise, revolutionizing – those social and productive relationships that determine the concrete forms of alienation of the present age. Feuerbach remains trapped in ideology, a rule of ideas that abstracts from and hinders a true perception of the actual configuration of empirical reality. This is why Marx’s eleven “Theses on Feuerbach” end with the famous slogan “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point is to change it.”46 Thus far, they would seem to share Stirner’s arguments against Feuerbach’s residual idealism. Yet Stirner’s “unique own,” the individual who is only for himself, even if he has the merit of being a real, concretely existing being, is also said by them to be construed in essentially ahistorical terms. Satirizing Stirner as an imaginary “Saint Max,” an inquisitorial Church Father, they judge that he

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

423

simply does not take sufficiently seriously the actual configuration of social relationships or their historical context, even when he is discussing concrete issues of law and property. His idiosyncratic anarchism thus vitiates rather than empowers the real struggle of the Proletariat against exploitation. Questions of religion undoubtedly dominated a certain period in the development of Left Hegelianism, yet according to Marx himself (in his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”), the critique of religion was a task that had already been “essentially completed” by 1844,47 and was merely the precursor of the more important critique of society. When Marx states, “Man makes religion, religion does not make man,”48 he knows that he is merely restating Feuerbach. Where he goes beyond this is in arguing that the struggle against religion is to be fought not on the terrain of ideas or theory but “against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”49 This introduces perhaps his most famous comment on religion, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Consequently, as he goes on to argue, “To call on [people] to give up their illusions about their condition [i.e., religion] is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”50 Here we can see precisely why religion quite rapidly ceases to be a major topic in Marx’s later thought. For religion does not have the status of a truly basic part of the real world. It is not itself the real cause of any social state of affairs, and more important than attacking religion is destroying the structure of which it is a mere reflex: “thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”51

Russian Nihilism The term “nihilism” is generally regarded as having been introduced into modern philosophy at the close of the eighteenth century by F. H. Jacobi. But it became especially associated with the particular amalgam of modern ideas that came together in Russia in the 1850s and 1860s and that was first popularized through Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. Nihilism is represented in the novel in the figure of Bazarov, a young doctor whose beliefs (or lack thereof) are the subject of an exchange between his friend and admirer Arkady and the latter’s father and uncle: “He is a nihilist,” repeated Arkady. “A nihilist,” said Nikolai Petrovich. “That comes from the Latin nihil – nothing, I imagine; the term must signify a man who … who recognizes nothing?” “Say – who respects nothing,” put in Pavel Petrovich, and set to work with the butter again. “Who looks at everything critically,” observed Arkady.

424

GEORGE PATTISON

“Isn’t that exactly the same thing?” asked Pavel Petrovich. “No, it’s not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not take any principle for granted, however much that principle may be revered.” … “It used to be Hegelians, and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you manage to exist in a void, in an airless vacuum….”52

Shortly afterward, Bazarov offers his own views to Arkady’s affronted uncle: “A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet,” interrupted Bazarov. “Oh, indeed,” commented Pavel Petrovich, raising his eyebrows slightly, as though he had come near to falling asleep. “I take it you do not acknowledge art, then?” “The art of making money or of advertising pills for piles?” exclaimed Bazarov with a contemptuous laugh. “Quite so, sir, quite so. You will have your joke, I see. So you reject all that? Very well. So you only believe in science?” “I have already explained to you that I don’t believe in anything: and what is science – science in the abstract? There are sciences, as there are trades and professions, but abstract science just doesn’t exist.”53

But although Bazarov, echoing Stirner, also rejects all political causes, 1860s nihilism took a distinctly political and revolutionary form. A key figure was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, like many other anti-theologians a sometime theology student, whose work was influenced by many Western sources, including John Stuart Mill, French utopian socialism, and, especially, Feuerbach. His novel What Is to Be Done? envisaged a future of utopian communities inhabiting structures modeled on London’s Crystal Palace and practicing free love. Meanwhile, in real life, the radical activist Sergei Nechaev was providing a frighteningly consistent example of what nihilism could mean. Nechaev came to prominence in 1869 after the murder in Moscow of a student who had belonged to his revolutionary circle. Fleeing abroad, he found refuge in Switzerland with the exiled anarchist, M. A. Bakunin. Nechaev’s “Revolutionary Catechism” included a section on “The Duties of the Revolutionary towards Himself,” which called for the renunciation of all personal interests, feelings, property, personal attachments, moral codes, and social laws and conventions. The revolutionary is to be always ready for death, and his sole and exclusive concern is to be the destruction of the existing social order.54 Yet, if one abstracts from their specific political content, these injunctions have a striking resemblance to some extreme versions of religious asceticism: the focus on one, exclusive goal; indifference to pleasure and pain; readiness for death; and suppression of individual inclinations – in a monastic or other ascetic context these would, for many Christians, be precisely virtues, and

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

425

it is in just this inverted analogy that one perhaps best sees how nihilism can be understood not as a simple atheism, but as an anti-theology. In any case, Nechaev seems to have lived out the teachings of the Catechism to a degree that alarmed even Bakunin, who wrote to a friend, “All personal ties, all friendship … are considered by [members of Nechaev’s party] as an evil, which they have the right to destroy – because all this constitutes a force which, being outside the secret organization, diminishes the sole force of this latter.”55 Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons gives a further literary portrayal of nihilism, partly inspired by Nechaev’s organization. This describes how a group of subversives sets about undermining the social and moral order of a provincial town, culminating in a series of murders, which include a member of the circle, killed solely in order to bind the other members together by a shared guilt. Their most articulate spokesman is Kirillov, who believes that by an act of suicide he will be able to inaugurate a new era in human history. His reasoning is that the fear of death is the primary reason for the persistence of belief in God and for human beings submitting themselves to the supposed “will of God.” What Kirillov aims at is by a fully autonomous act to demonstrate that death is subordinate to human freedom and not vice versa. As he explains, “If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will.” “Self-will? And why is it your duty?” “Because the will has become all mine. Can it be that no one on the whole planet, having ended God and believed in self-will, dares to proclaim self-will as the fullest point? It’s as if a poor man received an inheritance, got scared, and doesn’t dare go near the bag, thinking he’s too weak to own it. I want to proclaim self-will. I may be the only one, but I’ll do it.” … “To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize that you have become God, is an absurdity, otherwise you must necessarily kill yourself. Once you recognize it, you are king, and you will not kill yourself but will live in the chiefest glory. But one, the one who is first, must necessarily kill himself, otherwise who will begin and prove it?”56

Many early readers of Dostoevsky, especially in the West, confused him with the views of some of his own characters, but it is clear that Dostoevsky is strongly critical of the nihilistic position, even if he has a certain sympathy for the nihilists’ motivations. As he makes explicit in the figure of Kirillov, he regards the combined tendencies of nineteenth-century materialism, whether in its Utilitarian, Hegelian, utopian socialist, or Feuerbachian variants, and the elevation of autonomy to an absolute principle, as collectively expressing human beings’ attempt to take the place of God, and to supplant faith in the God-Man with belief in the ManGod. In his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the devil himself mocks Ivan

426

GEORGE PATTISON

Karamazov’s dreams of a future worldly utopia without God and ridicules the “man-god … [who] … in this new rank, [is able] to jump light-heartedly over any former obstacle of the former slave-man, if need be. There is no law for God! Where God stands – there is the place of God! Where I stand, there at once will be the foremost place … ‘everything is permitted’, and that’s that!”57 Human beings are no longer constrained by any divine law or even “moral world-order,” but have become the gods they no longer believe in.

Nietzsche Nietzsche read Dostoevsky, as he read most of the other figures considered in this brief overview of the anti-theologians. Whether he had specifically read Demons is unclear, but he offered a version of the struggle between divine and human will that remarkably echoes that of Kirillov. However, for Nietzsche the triumph of human will was not to be won by voluntary death but by living without the metaphysical illusions and moral fears that underpinned belief in God. By virtue of the thoroughness and acuity with which he pursued this conviction and of the poetic brilliance of the language and imagery in which he articulated it, Nietzsche emerged as (and arguably remains) the supreme anti-theologian, whose influence even the theologians themselves – from Karl Barth58 to postmodernists – are from time to time compelled to admit. In Nietzsche we see many of the arguments and claims found amongst previous anti-theologians. With Schopenhauer (an early and formative “educator”),59 he regarded the world as intrinsically purposeless and meaningless; with Feuerbach, he saw religion as the projection into an other-world of what are, in reality, forms of human consciousness; with Stirner, he found in the arbitrary and utterly individual ego the sole actual ground of values and ideas; and with the Russian nihilists, he portrayed the relationship between human beings and God as a life-and-death struggle – and, like them, he emphasized that the new world to be discovered after the death of God required a peculiar kind of ascesis, no less rigorous than that of the Christian worldview. Yet there are also decisive differences from each of these. Whereas Schopenhauer responded to the meaninglessness of the world by denying the will-to-live, Nietzsche found in this very meaninglessness an invitation to freely create his own values and meanings. Similarly, whereas Feuerbach affirmed Christian values (especially love) and merely called for these to be humanized, Nietzsche rejected Christian values themselves, seeing “love,” for example, as just one more ruse deployed by an unquenchable will-to-power – in this, perhaps resembling Stirner and also Marx. However, his view of the self is more dynamic than that of the former, and his conception of the false reality underpinning Christian doctrines and values was very different from that of Marx. And, unlike the Russian nihilists (and also unlike Marx), he had no interest in social revolution: on the contrary, he believed that cultivation of a new kind of selfhood was the only possible basis for any

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

427

future transformation of society. Nietzsche claimed for himself the title of “the Anti-Christ,” and not without reason. His writings not only recapitulate but also radicalize the criticisms of religion found with other anti-theologians and offer an imaginative vision of how a life lived without God might look, above all in his “Zarathustra,” the prophet of the new values and of the “Superman” who is to create them. In his book Ecce Homo60 and in some of his last letters, Nietzsche makes what seem like extraordinarily hyperbolic claims about his own importance – yet with hindsight these were not so ridiculous: his influence on the avant-garde of early twentieth-century modernism was quite decisive, as too on political movements such as fascism, or cultural and philosophical movements such as existentialism and postmodernism, and also modern psychotherapy.61 He summed up and brought to a brilliantly refined and sharpened point the central tendencies of European atheism. Perhaps the best and certainly the most focused introduction to Nietzsche’s critical view of religion is the collection of three essays entitled The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Here, Nietzsche offers a psychological history of Christianity, proposing a “genealogy” of morality, that is, an account of the origins of Christianity, that does not require – and, indeed, rules out – the hypothesis of divine intervention. We shall return to the question as to the nature of Nietzsche’s argument, but first I shall summarize the case as Nietzsche puts it. In the order of nature, Nietzsche argues, the strong dominate and there is no question of good or evil, only of noble and base. Thus, in archaic society a Hector and an Achilles confront each other as equally noble – and neither would condescend to single combat with an enemy he did not regard as his peer. The question is not who is right, but simply who is stronger. When the bird of prey swoops down on a flock of sheep and snatches away a lamb, it is only fulfilling its nature, and it is only from the lamb’s point of view that what it does is “bad.”62 As civilization develops, however, things get more complicated. It is no longer simply a matter of the strong and the weak, and alongside the warrior appears another kind of ruler, the priest. The priest does not have the same natural superiority as the warrior, but he has other, more subtle means of pursuing and securing power. If we look back to the ancient world, Nietzsche argues, it is above all the Jews who present us with an example of a society molded by a priestly caste. As we all know, priests are the most evil enemies to have – why should this be so? Because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history – but also the most intelligent haters have been priests. Beside the brilliance of priestly vengeance all other brilliance fades. Human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotents. Let us begin with the most striking example. Whatever else has been done to damage the powerful and great of this earth seems trivial compared with what the Jews have done, that priestly people who succeeded in avenging themselves on their enemies and oppressors by radically inverting all their values, that is, by an act of the most spiritual vengeance. This was a strategy entirely appropriate to a priestly people in whom

428

GEORGE PATTISON

vindictiveness had gone most deeply underground. It was the Jew who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/ powerful/beautiful/happy/favored-of-the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that “only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly bless. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and the damned!”… We know who has fallen heir to this Jewish invention of values.63

This, then, is the “slave revolt in morality.” But – not least in the light of Nietzsche’s association with Nazism64 – it is important to be clear just what he is talking about here and, especially, to note the key phrase “We know who has fallen heir to this Jewish invention of values,” that is, Christianity. In a word, it is Christianity, not Judaism, that is the target of Nietzsche’s attack and, in particular, Christianity’s triumph over the warrior virtues of the Roman Empire. Later, in the second essay, he will describe the mechanism by which this “slave revolt” triumphed as the invention of conscience: it is conscience that persuades the hitherto innocent warrior or aristocratic ruler that what he does is violent, cruel, and damnable. To some extent it is clear that this is an almost necessary result of the complexification of society, and that at a certain stage of social development, the warrior virtues need to be constrained for the sake of society as a whole.65 Yet Nietzsche believes that, historically, this was only possible through the repeated infliction over many generations of physical punishment and even torture (“How much blood and horror lies behind all ‘good things’!” he exclaims).66 What occurs with the invention of “conscience” is that such external means of coercion are internalized – and it is just this internalization of guilt that occurred in the historical triumph of Christianity. Thus, Man, with his need for self-torture, his sublimated cruelty resulting from the cooping up of his animal nature within a polity, invented bad conscience in order to hurt himself, after the blocking of the more natural outlet of his cruelty. Then this guilt-ridden man seized upon religion in order to exacerbate his self-torment to the utmost. The thought of being in God’s debt became his new instrument of torture. He focused in God the last of the opposites he could find to his true and inveterate animal instincts, making these a sin against God (hostility, rebellion against the “Lord”, the “Father,” the “Creator”). He stretched himself upon the contradictions “God” and “Devil” as on a rack. He projected all his denials of self, nature, naturalness out of himself as affirmations, as true being, embodiment, reality, as God (the divine Judge and Executioner), as transcendence, as eternity, as endless torture, as hell, as the infinite of guilt and punishment. In such psychological cruelty we see an insanity of will that is without parallel: man’s will to find himself guilty and unredeemably so…. What a mad, unhappy animal is man!67

Nietzsche’s “genealogy of morals” contains many such passages – bold, inventive, provocative, and scandalous. But what sort of argument did Nietzsche think he was putting forward? He did not pretend that this was an academic study, and

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

429

he makes no effort to source or reference his claims. Even in the few citations given here, readers will easily find sweeping generalizations that could without difficulty be shown to be mistaken. This would not perturb Nietzsche. And why not? Because, since both theistic belief and all other metaphysical views are (in his view) human constructs and therefore historically relative, there is no such thing as absolute truth. As he states in the posthumous notes published as The Will to Power, once we realize that the world has no intrinsic meaning, then the only way to live is like artists, creating our own worlds and our own values. His aim, therefore, is not to demonstrate that Christianity or other forms of religious belief are untrue but that religion and morality are repellent and no longer to our “taste.” This point also relates to another possible misreading of what Nietzsche is calling for in The Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere. When he praises the noble warrior virtues of archaic peoples and heralds the will-to-power as the basis of all intellectual, moral, and cultural productions, he is not calling for a reversion to the actual way of life depicted in, for example, Homer’s Iliad. We cannot turn back the clock of history in that way. The arena in which the will-to-power is to be chiefly operative today is itself that of culture and the creation of imaginative worlds and values. The question is not who is most powerful in straightforward physical terms. Rather, it is who is capable of creating images and aspirations to guide human beings in the vacuum left by the death of God, as Nietzsche himself attempts to do in his account of the wanderings and meditations of Zarathustra, prophet of a lifestyle of self-invention – who seeks neither to coerce others nor to make disciples, but only to find and encourage friends. These reflections apply also to the “death of God,” perhaps the phrase most associated with Nietzsche in the domain of religious ideas. If we read the passage in which Nietzsche describes the Madman who, “on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ ”68 before announcing to the amused onlookers the death of God, it will be clear that this is by no means a simple description of a historical event: it is more in the way of a parable, a many-leveled prose poem that addresses the imagination as much as it appeals to the intellect. This is not to say that we can pigeonhole Nietzsche as an “artist” and conclude that his work has no philosophical bite. On the contrary, his artistry is premised on a complex understanding of the relativity of truth: he writes a poem of the death of God rather than arguing for God’s nonexistence precisely because he is seeking to enact and not merely to report God’s death. God may or may not exist, but God will only truly “die” when human beings having found the courage not only to take leave of God but also to abandon all the various God-substitutes with which so many nineteenth-century (and subsequent) atheists have sought to fill the gap left by the dead God, from Feuerbachian belief in God, through Marxist and non-Marxist professions of faith in science and historical progress, to Schopenhauerian asceticism and the mysticism of aesthetic detachment from the world. Not only in what he says, but also in how he says it, Nietzsche shows that atheism is not just a matter of accepting the theoretical proposition that there is no God, but is a hard and bitter road that

430

GEORGE PATTISON

calls for constant and rigorous self-scrutiny and self-transformation. Only the atheist who is prepared to tread that road to the very end (as Jean-Paul Sartre would claim he had done) will be capable of offering a genuine and powerful antitheology that might really shake the deep human foundations of religious belief.

Conclusion We have surveyed some of the more influential versions of nineteenth-century anti-theology, noting how, despite their common front against religious belief, they are often as harshly critical of each other as they are of theology itself. Yet how compelling should we find their arguments? As I have just suggested with regard to Nietzsche, I do not think it sufficient for theology to respond to the antitheologians by identifying the philosophical or historical flaws and loopholes in their arguments. The power of anti-theology lies not in the footnotes but in its radical re-envisioning of human values. If theology is ever successfully to counter the force of anti-theology (and dominant cultural trends suggest that, as of now, it is still far from doing so), it has to be capable of taking the argument to the anti-theologians’ own ground, and reversing the value judgments about human values and human flourishing that drive the anti-theological case. Already in the nineteenth century there were several outstanding examples of such responses, amongst them the work of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky (both of whom appear to criticize Nietzsche avant la lettre). It could be tempting to say that the history of the twentieth century has now done the job for us and that Bolshevism and Fascism, the hubris of scientism, and the sexual, narcotic, and violent excesses of Western culture show only too clearly where faith in the Man-God leads. Yet the uncertain and fluid state of current intellectual, cultural, and political life does not allow for any simplistic conclusions, and it would be naïve to see the kind of nihilism so decisively articulated by Nietzsche as merely a thing of the past. In this situation, religious believers need the resources not only of philosophy, psychology, and other relevant academic disciplines, but also of the kind of sensitivities found amongst poets, painters, and novelists to challenge not just the theology, but also the anthropology, the view of human good, that drives the anti-theological movement.

Notes 1 See, e.g., Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2001); also numerous references to nihilism in the works of John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Philip Blond, and other writers in the “radical orthodoxy” movement. 2 The legend of the Wandering Jew was ubiquitous in Romantic literature – in the 1830s, Kierkegaard could describe it as one of the three great ideas that epitomized the spirit of the age (along with Don Juan and Faust).

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

431

3 The question as to whether Kant concealed his true thought “for fear of the police” is found already in H. Heine’s essay on “Religion and Philosophy in Germany.” See H. Heine, “Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland,” in Werke (Weimar: Volksverlag, 1962), 5:106. 4 De Lubac for one takes him seriously as a leading representative of atheist humanism. See Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995). 5 See A. Comte, Catéchisme Positiviste (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 51ff. 6 For similar reasons I am not including Darwin in this survey, even though he has become incorporated into the slogans of contemporary atheism. Darwin himself refrained from overtly attacking Christianity and certainly had no intention of inaugurating anything like a new religion of humanity. 7 A. Schopenhauer, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde [On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason] in A. Schopenhauer, Zürcher Ausgabe (Zürich: Diogenes, 1977), 5:160. 8 Schopenhauer, Zürcher Ausgabe, 1:205. I have used the translation by E. F. J. Payne, in A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1966), 1:153. 9 Schopenhauer, Zürcher Ausgabe, 5:100. 10 Ibid., 9:326. 11 Ibid., 2:402–403; and Schopenhauer, The World as Will, 1:322. 12 On Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Buddhism, see C. J. Ryan, Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion (Leuven: Peeters, 2009). 13 Schopenhauer, Zürcher Ausgabe, 2:507; and Schopenhauer, The World as Will, 1: 410–411. 14 Schopenhauer, Zürcher Ausgabe, 4:529; and Schopenhauer, The World as Will, 2:450. 15 Schopenhauer, Zürcher Ausgabe, 1:503; and Schopenhauer, The World as Will, 1:405. 16 Ibid. 17 Schopenhauer’s contemptuous references to other thinkers once cost him an academic award, when the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences said of his essay, “On the Basis of Morality,” that “It cannot be passed over in silence, that several outstanding philosophers of the modern age are discussed in such an unseemly manner as to arouse justifiable and serious offence.” See Schopenhauer, Zürcher Ausgabe, 11:316–317. 18 F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1946), 42. 19 See Warren Breckmann, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origin of Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Several of the key figures (Bauer, Marheineke, Rosenkranz, F.C. Baur, Daub, and J. E. Erdmann) are also discussed in J. Stewart, ed., Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 20 D. F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, ed. P. C. Hodgson (London: SCM Press, 1973), lii. 21 Strauss, Life of Jesus, 507–519. 22 Ibid., 757.

432

GEORGE PATTISON

23 Ibid., 781. 24 D. F. Strauss, Die christlich Glaubenslehre (Tübingen: Osiander, 1840–1841), 1:359. 25 L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot (New York: Prometheus, 1989), 197. 26 Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 1. 27 Ibid., 14. 28 Ibid., 50. 29 Ibid., 53. 30 Evans translates “Herz” as “Affection.” 31 Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 3. 32 Ibid., 269. 33 Ibid., 268. 34 L. Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1986), 51. 35 Feuerbach, Principles, 67. 36 Nom de plume of Johann Caspar Schmidt (1806–1856). 37 M. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. D. Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33–34. 38 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, 34. 39 Ibid., 36. 40 Ibid., 55. 41 Ibid., 37. 42 Ibid., 145–146. 43 Ibid., 318. 44 D. Leopold, “Introduction” in Ibid., xi. 45 K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965), 57–58. 46 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 662. 47 K. Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 244. 48 Marx, Early Writings, 245. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 244. 51 Ibid., 244–245. 52 I. S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. R. Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 94. 53 Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 97–98. 54 For more on Nechaev, see references in J. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865–1871 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); also N. Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (London: G. Bles, 1937), 69–72. The Revolutionary Catechism is hard to obtain in print, but is widely available on the Internet. Its authorship is sometimes ascribed, at least in part, to Bakunin. See A. Lehning, Michel Bakounine et ses Relations avec Sergei Nečaev, 1870–1872 (Leiden: Brill, 1972). 55 Quoted in Frank, Dostoevsky, 441. 56 F. M. Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (London: Everyman, 2000), 617–619. 57 F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 1992), 646–647.

SKEPTICS AND ANTI-THEOLOGIANS

433

58 See, for example, the references in Barth’s Commentary on Romans (1919). 59 The allusion is to Nietzsche’s essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” part of the volume Untimely Observations (1873–1876). 60 The title itself invites the reader to compare its author with Christ, alluding as it does to Pilate’s words “Behold the Man” (John 19:5). 61 Nietzsche’s influence on Freud and Carl Jung has long been acknowledged (Jung even wrote a two-volume commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra). See also Carl Rogers’ summary of the aims of the therapeutic process in his essay “ ‘To Be That Self Which One Truly Is’: A Therapist’s View of Personal Goals,” in C. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (London: Constable, 1967), 163–182. 62 F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Anchor, 1956), 178. 63 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 167. 64 Nietzsche himself was contemptuous of anti-Semitism, although his sister saw to the deletion of remarks critical of anti-Semites in the posthumous works whose publication she managed. We should perhaps also note the comment that, without the priests, history would be “dull and stupid.” The concluding reflections of the third essay (on the meaning of ascetic ideals) also suggest that the intellectual cunning of the priests is not an inheritance we should wish to discard. 65 This argument seems to anticipate that of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). 66 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 194. 67 Ibid., 225–226. 68 Quoted from the 1910 translation of Thomas Common that in this great passage translates something of the poetry as well as the prose of sec. 125 of The Joyful Wisdom. See F. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. T. Common (London: Foulis, 1910), 167ff.

Bibliography Cupitt, Don. The Sea of Faith. London: SCM Press, 2003. Gillespie, Michael Allen. Nihilism before Nietzsche. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. de Lubac, Henri. The Drama of Atheist Humanism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: Volume 4: Nihilism, ed. D. F. Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Pattison, George. Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.

CHAPTER 21

History of Religion School Mark D. Chapman

The “History of Religion School” was a group of German theological scholars, principally in biblical studies, who came together in Göttingen at the end of the 1880s.1 Unlike some of their contemporaries – including Martin Kähler – they did not try to create a “storm-free area” for religion immune from scientific criticism, but instead attempted a thoroughgoing use of a critical historical method in theology. There were obvious dangers in such an approach. As the New Testament scholar Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920)2 observed, historical research was in “danger of placing Christianity in the flux of development,” consequently “failing to give due worth to its special character and unique meaning, and thereby neutralising and relativizing everything.”3

The Formation of the History of Religion School The most formative influence on the whole generation of German theologians working in the years before 1914 was Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889), professor of theology in Göttingen. Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), who became the leading systematic theologian of the History of Religion School, claimed that “it was Ritschl who won us for theology; his powerful personality attracted us to Göttingen; we formed his last school.”4 Among this circle of young academics were Bousset, Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932),5 Troeltsch, as well as Ritschl’s son-in-law, Johannes Weiss (1863–1914);6 Alfred Rahlfs (1865–1935); Heinrich Hackmann (1864–1935); William Wrede (1859–1906);7 Albert Eichhorn (1856–1926);8 Wilhelm Heitmüller (1869–1926); Hugo Greßmann (1877– 1927); Paul Wernle (1872–1939); Heinrich Weinel (1874–1936); and Richard Reitzenstein (1861–1931). Although the different members of the School had distinctive emphases, they were characterized by Greßmann as a “circle of researchers essentially of one mind, who worked under the guidance of the same

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

435

spirit, shared a related set of problems, and on the whole represented the same fundamental viewpoint.”9 This can be summarized in an approach to the Bible and more generally to Christianity based on a radical historical consciousness, which meant that theology could no longer rely on its own special methods. Although Ritschl’s influence on the History of Religion School was profound, many of his leading tenets were soon rejected. The School quickly became, in Gunkel’s words, a “school without a teacher.”10 A strictly historical approach to the New Testament revealed a completely different account of Jesus from Ritschl’s. His isolation of Christianity from other religions was regarded as little more than a dogmatic assertion of the uniqueness of Christianity. Where Ritschl saw history as functioning merely to confirm Christian revelation, the History of Religion School held that the very concept of Christianity itself had to be established on the basis of historical research. Many of Ernst Troeltsch’s early essays set about the task of justifying the study of the history of religion within theology against what he regarded as the artificial isolation of Christianity: “I want to place [Christianity] in connection and comparison with all aspects of reality and with other religions.”11 Given their interest in the wider study of history and religion, members of the School were open to intellectual influences from outside the theology faculty. Particularly important was Paul de Lagarde, Professor of Oriental Languages at Göttingen and Ritschl’s leading opponent. He had called for a historical science of religion, freed from both dogmatism and Hegelianism. In honoring Lagarde, who had dismissed Martin Luther as a medievalist, Troeltsch and Gunkel were effectively attacking what they regarded as the impotence of a modern-day Protestantism which attempted simply to renew the tradition of the Reformation. Another key influence was the Göttingen Professor of Old Testament, Bernhard Duhm, who was deeply critical of the “confusion of religion with theology, and the constriction of the former by the latter.”12 As he made clear in his influential book on the prophets, Duhm regarded religion as something distinct from dogmatic formulations, marked first and foremost by enthusiasm and inspiration.13 This emphasis on the role of the spirit again marks a decisive reaction to Ritschl, who had downplayed the role of religious experience and was deeply critical of pietism.14 In contrast, the members of the History of Religion School emphasized the primacy of experience. Gunkel, for instance, claimed, “We recognize God’s revelation in the great persons of religion who experience the holy mystery in their depths and speak in tongues of fire.”15

Characteristics of the School This emphasis on the effects of the spirit both on the individual and in the religious community forms one of the leading themes of the School. In his dissertation on the effects of the Holy Spirit, Gunkel claimed that “the most decisive

436

MARK D. CHAPMAN

religious persons” were “those filled with the spirit.”16 Other works stressing the primacy of the spirit quickly followed.17 Consequently, unlike much theology of the past, the History of Religion School was not principally concerned with the analysis of theological and dogmatic statements, but with the explanation of what Wrede called “appearances and moods.”18 History of religion was thus not the “history of dogma, but the history of piety,” characterized by “the enormous variety and the fulness of religious ideas and appearances which dominate human thought and the human heart and have determined human wills.”19 Members of the History of Religion School consequently investigated popular piety and religion instead of dogma and ethical injunctions. As Bousset wrote, [T]o attain a living conception of religion one does not only, and perhaps not even primarily, look at the clear world of ideas and concepts, at biblical injunctions, dogmas and doctrines, but rather, one looks at the broad stream of the religious life which flows along a different bed from that which we had previously imagined; it flows along the bed of moods and fantasies, of experiences and events of the most primitive kind which are often difficult to control: in ethics, custom and cultus.20

Similarly, he claimed that “the beginnings of Christianity in which we might include Paul, John and Gnosticism have nothing, I repeat absolutely nothing, to do with the distinctive philosophical literature of the educated classes.”21 The primary object of investigation was not literary study of the various books of the Bible, but the religion expressed by these books, which – in contrast to most earlier Protestant scholarship – led to a focus on the sacraments (as, for instance, with Heitmüller) or mysticism (as with Bousset). This history of religion method – as distinct from history of religions method – was most clearly expressed by Gunkel: From the outset we did not understand history of religion as the history of religions but as the history of religion…. We were convinced that the ultimate purpose of our work on the Bible was to look in the hearts of the people of religion, to experience their thoughts inwardly and adequately to describe them. We did not chiefly want to occupy ourselves with the books of the Bible and their criticism, but rather we sought to read the living religion from these books. We are convinced that one grasps living religion not when one systematically orders the doctrines of the biblical authors together, but rather when one represents religion in its movement as it rises up out of the great people who are moved by the spirit of God. Thus no “biblical theology” of the old kind, but “history of religion.” This is a history of religion without breaches or window-dressing, carried out according to the strict rules of the rest of the discipline of history; it is a history of religion which shows the intricate picture of a religion as it stands in inmost connection to the political, cultural and social milieux; it shows how religious ideas originate, how they grapple and unite among themselves, how the stuff of religion is transferred from one generation to the next, continually altered and bearing new ideas.22

This approach led many to the interpretation of Paul, for whom, according to Gunkel, “the whole life of the Christian” was “a work of the spirit … revealing an

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

437

overwhelming, supernatural divine power.”23 Similarly, in his dissertation of 1890 on Paul’s understanding of the law, Bousset emphasizes the impact of the saint’s experience on his writings. He “pointed to the fault of almost all Pauline exegetes,” who had “far too rarely posed the question as to how Paul came to this or that train of thought” and who thus neglected his syncretism, enthusiasm, and mysticism and their connection to the broader history of religion.24 In Kyrios Christos, Bousset traces the development of the Church from its beginnings in St. Paul until Irenaeus’ first great ecclesiastical synthesis. For Paul, Bousset claims, “the effects of the spirit essentially come to life and experience in the community assembled for worship.”25 However, as the Church grew, according to Bousset, what began as a product of devotion became an object of faith: [T]he dogma of the divinity of Christ is on the march. We must never forget that behind the personal piety and the theology of Paul there is a living power and the reality of the cultic devotion of the lord kyrios in the community. What is worshipped must stand unconditionally on the side of God. Although Paul, following his Old Testament instincts, avoids the predicate of the divinity of Christ and looks to hold on to the distinction between theos and kyrios, the massive communal faith will quickly push the dogmatic distinction aside. It speaks consciously of the great mystery of the divinity of Christ and is placed in the centre of the Christian religion. For it is already there in cult and practice.26

Doctrine thus did not develop through the rational thought processes of the theologian, but acquired its own momentum in the worship of Christ in the cult: theology was thus an expression of religion.27 This understanding of the essence of Pauline religion in primordial religious experience rather than hard-and-fast doctrines naturally challenged earlier scholarship. At the same time, it served another purpose: the study of the historical origins of Christianity disclosed an underlying spiritual essence which endured despite all historical criticism. Whatever the historical study of religion might reveal, Bousset claimed, the spiritual essence of religion would be left intact: “faith teaches us that we are related to this essence of reality in the depths of our being, that we grasp it in our hearts, and our nature finds repose in it.”28 Ultimately the religious truth of Christianity would resist historical criticism. Thus Gunkel wrote that “just because the belief in resurrection and the conception of the Messiah as ‘essential elements of the Christian religion’ can be traced to external influences, this is no reason to doubt the absoluteness of Christianity.”29 Although history could give knowledge of the origin and the development of religion, it could never remove the “mysterious and powerful in human life,” which was to be found solely in an immediate contact with the “Spirit of God.”30 Although Gunkel admitted that “[a]ppearances of the spirit” had become less frequent than in Paul’s day, he held that “they had never died out.”31 In short, he claimed, religion was nothing other than “the supernatural power which is sent from God through Christ and works a miracle on those who believe.”32 In this way the History of Religion School gave new life to the old

438

MARK D. CHAPMAN

orthodox Lutheran doctrine of the unio mystica. Bousset, for instance, regarded religion as a “personal communion with the Godhead.”33 Such knowledge of God was unmediated by any history: “in the last resort these researches lead man into the depths of his own being and demand this of him: affirm this depth of your own life.”34 This emphasis on the role of experience and mysticism was often in tension with the thoroughgoing adoption of a historical method. Some sought to reconcile this tension by adopting a form of idealism and a concomitant strong belief in the progress of the spirit through time. Bousset, for instance, considered that the “course of our wanderings through the history of religion” revealed “that the Christian religion is absolutely superior to all other religions, and that Christianity represents the highest point which religious development has reached.”35 History of religion was thus “a great work of God, a ceaseless upwards attraction, a continual discourse of God with humans and of humans with God.”36

Ernst Troeltsch and the “Systematic Theology of the History of Religion School” Troeltsch, however, was wary of such claims: he regarded it as impossible “to construct a theory of Christianity as the absolute religion on the basis of a historical way of thinking or by the use of historical means.”37 As the “systematic theologian” of the School, he drew the history of religion method to its logical conclusion. Outlining his program in the American Journal of Theology, Troeltsch echoed his earlier work on the absoluteness of Christianity.38 He claimed that “we are thrust back to history itself and the necessity of constructing from this history a religious world of ideas that shall be normative for us.”39 His interest was thus in the history of religion “only in so far as it has been appropriated, or can be appropriated by theology.”40 According to Troeltsch, any systematic theology after Schleiermacher had to be a thoroughgoing “historical investigation of the development of Christianity itself.”41 Only after this had been undertaken could the theologian move to the second task: the attempt to discern the “power which lies deeper than any historical formulation which it may have produced.”42 Recognizing that this was an extraordinarily difficult task, Troeltsch nevertheless held that it was crucial since without systematic theology, the study of the history of religion could only “contribute to an increase in the anarchy of historicism.”43 In distinction to other members of the History of Religion School, however, Troeltsch emphasized the importance of a historical expression for the religion of the spirit. In his book on Christian social teachings, he wrote, The so-called History of Religion School goes back entirely to spiritual religion (Spiritualismus), and is therefore ecclesiastically “impotent.” My own theology is certainly spiritual but for that very reason it seeks to make room for the historical

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

439

element, and for the cultic and sociological factor which is bound up with it. Naturally I am aware of the difficulties of such an undertaking.44

Troeltsch encountered significant opposition from many of his contemporaries who had also studied with Ritschl, including Wilhelm Herrmann, Julius Kaftan, and Max Resichle, but who had developed their teacher’s theology in a different direction. Unlike Troeltsch, they claimed that the spheres of religion and science were completely independent. Troeltsch’s most dramatic conflict took place with Julius Kaftan. At a meeting of the Friends of the liberal newspaper Die christliche Welt in 1896, Kaftan had lectured on the doctrine of the logos. In response, Troeltsch leapt to his feet and said, “Es wackelt alles” (Everything is tottering). He then left the room, slamming the door behind him.45 Later Troeltsch called what he regarded as the dualistic method of the Ritschlians “a grotesque piece of theological scholasticism” which aimed to remove “the critical historical method and any analogy with universal human events, and to erect a new theological history, which is not history but dogma.”46 Where Ritschlian epistemology rested on direct experience or the inner “impression” of Christ, and isolated religion from all other phenomena, Troeltsch refused to separate it from its historical background: “History of religion is no mere apologetic tool to show the peculiarity of Christianity,” he wrote, “but rather treats all the great founders and leaders the same.”47 Although Troeltsch conceded that what he called the “dogmatic method” of his opponents was consistent,48 he nevertheless held that it could not presume to be scientific since “to wish to possess the absolute in an absolute way at a particular point in history is a delusion.”49 Instead he maintained that theological truth was “one and the same truth which is reached from different angles and in different relations to the other elements of the spiritual life.”50 Similarly, he claimed, The demand for “absoluteness” is satisfied when Christianity has been traced to an immediate divine causality…. Absoluteness here consists of miracle. It is the absoluteness of a Christian Sunday causality in antithesis to the relativity and mediacy of a non-Christian weekday causality.51

Troeltsch made his clearest statement of what he called the “historical” method in the essay “On Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology,” published in 1900. He summarized it under three headings: first, all religious tradition had to be open to criticism;52 second, whatever happened in the past was analogous to some other event, which meant that “Jewish and Christian history are analogous to all other history”;53 and, third, the phenomenon of religion was to be investigated only insofar as it was correlated with the rest of historical and spiritual life.54 Troeltsch regarded this method as bringing about a profound change in all theology: “once it is applied to biblical scholarship and Church History, [the historical method] is a leaven that transforms everything and finally destroys all previous methods.”55

440

MARK D. CHAPMAN

Having clarified the historical method, Troeltsch moved on to what he called the philosophy of the history of religion,56 where he sought to evaluate the concrete phenomena of religion investigated by the historical method. The problem of the development of religion was thus central: “Does the historical way of thinking include the positive acknowledgement of Christianity as the highest realm of religious life and thought that has validity for us?”57 Throughout his career, he sought a form of philosophy of history which might allow him to discriminate the “value difference” between the higher and lower stages of religion.58 Instead of deriving the criterion of truth through some seemingly arbitrary dogmatic decision, he attempted to derive a criterion from what he called a “universal standpoint.”59 With this end in mind, Troeltsch debated at length with Adolf von Harnack, the leading historian of theology of the period, over the “essence of Christianity,” a subject that Harnack had popularized in his influential lectures of 1901. For Harnack, the Gospel message could be reduced to two straightforward themes: that God was the Father, and that the human soul was of infinite value60 which led to “eternal life in the midst of time.”61 For Troeltsch, however, Christianity could not be identified with any one of its forms.62 Instead, the conception of Christianity’s essence was not merely an abstraction from the manifestations, but at the same time a criticism of these manifestations, and this criticism is not merely an evaluation of that which is not yet complete in terms of the driving ideal, but a discrimination between that which corresponds to the essence and that which is contrary to it.63

Troeltsch agreed with Harnack that the theologian was called upon to judge history, but this could not be achieved simply by isolating a tiny snippet from the whole spectrum of Christianity. Instead the theological task was to show “what has been, so that its significance and meaning for human life as a whole can be evaluated.”64 This called for a philosophical assessment of the history of religion which was based upon, “but not exhausted by, the real history of religion.”65 Through the whole complex of religion, Troeltsch claimed, there was a “driving force or power.”66 Denying that he was a Hegelian or that he was seeking a metaphysics of the absolute, he outlined a philosophy of history.67 The goals and values of history could not be imposed from above or by prior judgment, but rather were reached only through the analysis of history itself. Thus, according to Troeltsch, even though the historical method leads to an inevitable relativization of religious phenomena as they become objects of human history, it was nevertheless still possible for human beings to recognize movement toward the realization of absolute goals. Troeltsch placed an enormous responsibility on the theologian involved in the study of history: even though nothing could be isolated from history, there was still a need to reach norms for practical living. Relativism, although an unavoidable aspect of modernity, did not necessarily deprive Christianity of its absolute basis. Indeed, according to Troeltsch, it was

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

441

“only the misguided habits of thought of rational or supernatural dogmatics [that] surround the word ‘relative’ with all the terrors of the uncertain, the unstable and the purposeless.”68 He thus went to great lengths to stress the constructive possibilities latent in historical relativism. This required a faith in the possibility of “the absolute and the eternal in the endless stream of becoming and finitude.”69 “In the relative,” he claimed pithily, “we will find a token of the absolute that transcends history.”70 Later in his career, Troeltsch became increasingly cautious about asserting the possibility of a reconciliation between the absolute and the relative in history: instead, he tended to locate absoluteness in the future as “the goal, characterized by a boundlessness and other-worldliness that transcend all history.”71 In looking to the future, he asserted in Kantian fashion that “we find a constant corrective for our own value constructions; … we dissolve all naïve attempts to isolate and absolutize that which is given.”72 The absolute functioned as the spur to constant criticism, yet in itself was the unknowable object of hope and longing. In a reply to a conservative Lutheran critic, Troeltsch gave what is perhaps his clearest summary of the concept of absoluteness: The absolute is with God; all human truth is relative, but in one way or another connected to the absolute. We live within approximate values, and thereby overcome the distinction between relative and absolute…. My theology lives from the absolute which is contained in approximations to it. I see no other possibility to achieve a religious standpoint, and therefore it is preferable to me than confessional Catholicism or Lutheranism.73

For Troeltsch, human knowledge was directed toward a gradual approximation to an unknown absolute which could only be affirmed in an act of faith. Inevitably such a solution was subjective and limited by the “short-sightedness and sinfulness” of all human beings which ruled out fanaticism,74 and led to a sense of humility and tolerance.75 Although Troeltsch felt that there were dangers in such a method – “death is possible in a system of danger”76 – Christianity still seemed to provide the religious powers for the future.77 It was “the only stable religious capital we possess, and a new religion exists only in books. Where religion is really alive, it requires nothing new, merely a transformation…. We are not afraid for the future of Christianity.”78 Even in 1922, after he had left the theology faculty at Heidelberg for the philosophical faculty at Berlin, Troeltsch continued to recognize that Christianity remained an abiding power, even if his own system had moved away from any recognizable orthodoxy.79

Troeltsch’s Dogmatic Theology At Heidelberg, where he was professor from 1895 to 1915, Troeltsch outlined a systematic theology, in both his lectures and his many contributions on dogmatic themes to the first edition of the magnum opus of the History of

442

MARK D. CHAPMAN

Religion School, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Following in the tradition of Schleiermacher, he called his lectures Glaubenslehre (teaching of the faith). Unlike Schleiermacher, however, he did not see dogmatic theology as a purely descriptive task of the present-day teaching of the church, but rather as a constructive task, “the attempt to develop new formulations appropriate to the present – a rejuvenation.”80 According to Troeltsch, revelation was not something complete, but “was in process. In the place of the mechanical concept of revelation is the dynamic.”81 Similarly, he claimed, God’s “peculiar manifestation rests not in being, but in becoming; thus not in nature, as something static, but in history.”82 His intentions were thus twofold: first to discuss the historical development of theology, and second to show the future possibilities of the power of religion. Ultimately, for Troeltsch, the test of any religion was whether it provided this practical power: all the resources of philosophy and all the triumphs of the tradition would be null and void unless there was the experience of redemption, which issued in the ethical act of the will.83 The theological objective of Glaubenslehre was thus to ensure that the higher world of spiritual absolute ends empowers and so transforms the natural historical world.

The problem of grace and freedom Troeltsch’s theology was focused on the problem of grace and freedom.84 Grace was concerned with raising up the creature from the suffering of the world to salvation and union with God: Redemption requires a breach with the finite world, since finite plans can only fulfil finite ends. Thus salvation can never be fully accomplished in this world: this is what is at fault in eudaemonism and utilitarianism. Rather, in devotion to God, and in the union of wills, there is a Deification of all human objectives.85

The highest ethical achievement is to move beyond finitude by giving over the self “to that divine power active in us.”86 Freedom is thus at one and the same time the work of the self and a work of God. [W]hat is good in freedom is that which is valid and obligatory, which does not stem from human beings, but from God. Nevertheless, what is free in freedom is the act of humans through which they make the divine their own.87

Similarly, in an unpublished lecture, Troeltsch wrote, Freedom and grace are no longer contradictory, but are concepts which need one another. There can be no effect of the divine spirit without freedom, but also no human sense of duty without being drawn up towards the divine. The concept of freedom has thus changed. It is no longer a question of what a human can do, but

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

443

what the human, confined in nature, should do…. Freedom and grace are two names for the same thing…. There is no autonomy without theonomy…. [Ethics] is God making himself effective in human beings.88

It was thus only in religion that there could be a move beyond the impasse of determinism and freedom since “there takes place a real interpenetration of the human and the divine spirit.”89 According to Troeltsch, then, the dialectic of grace and freedom is overcome in the creature’s return to God. The antecedents of this view lie in the teaching of Paul, Augustine, and the mystics, yet, he claimed, each of these traditions presented distortions. Augustine, for instance, was too ecclesiastical, and the mystics too Platonist. Similarly, Protestantism had neglected the subjective role in its overemphasis of the saving events of Christ’s death. To balance the poles, Troeltsch emphasized the creature’s participation in God’s creative power, which led to the “interpenetration of the finite and the infinite…. The finite is brought to its summit in the break with its own independence and finitude, and returns to God.”90 Such an interpenetration, however, was always “personal and immediately practical.”91 In an article on predestination, Troeltsch discusses the duality of freedom and grace from another angle, affirming the absolute worth of the personality which is conceivable only in terms of the absoluteness of God.92 The grounds for the absolute ethical value of the personality, and thus the human power to do what is good, rest in the divine will expressed in the notion of love: “The groundless will which creates creatures and raises them up to union with himself is love, and effects love as it converts the human will into the divine will.”93 The human personality thus develops as it gains access to this absolute domain through a union of wills: “the last ground of grounds is the complete groundlessness of the divine will.”94 That which is finite must be able to “cross over into the eternal.”95 Troeltsch recognizes many threats to such a view. First, determinism leaves no room for the possibility of the groundless will since everything is related to everything else. Second, Darwinism explains the problem of the dissimilarity of human beings as a product of physical laws where love disappears altogether with the idea of the survival of the fittest.96 Third, modern pantheism, while recognizing the groundless will, nevertheless regards it as impersonal: everything is thus seen as conditioned. To counter these charges Troeltsch reconstructs the doctrine of predestination. On the one hand, he sees the importance of affirming the universally valid, while, on the other hand, he asserts the inequality of participation in this reality as something essential to the constitution of the world. In order to reconcile this conflict, there could not be a return to the logical contradictions of the past by reckoning absolute causality along with finite causality. Instead, it was necessary to recognize the unknowable nature of the ground of being, in which human beings are united with the groundless seat of pure will.97 At the same time, Troeltsch recognizes that it was natural physical laws, which in themselves had no ethical content, which were responsible for the inequalities in human chances to share in freedom.

444

MARK D. CHAPMAN

Redemption as the personal experience of the union of wills Troeltsch differentiates Christianity from Islam and Judaism, which, on his analysis, remain essentially moralistic religions with no real concept of redemption: both equated the actual world with absolute ethical law. Salvation thus resulted from the individual following heteronomous laws. This meant that the Christian notion “that love can break forth from the inner essence of God and connect with the soul, remains strange.”98 The non-Christian expressions of the concept of redemption which could have relevance for the modern world, Troeltsch claimed, were those of Buddhism and pantheism. However, what separated them from Christianity was “the religious problem of the personality.”99 This pointed to the very different concepts of redemption in Christianity and the religions of the East. The problem was whether the divine life is recognised as the original ground of all freedom and consequently the goal of mankind is found in freedom and personality, or whether the sphere of the divine is in the impersonal, and personal life is only to be seen as an error which is to be overcome.100

In affirming the importance of Christian personalism against the impersonalism of the alternatives, Troeltsch emphasizes redemption as the “goal of raising up the creature” from the given.101 Redemption and Christ Troeltsch’s understanding of redemption is only loosely related to the activity of the redeemer. The relation of the historical Jesus to the Christian Faith proved a particular problem: if God was always in the process of self-revelation, then to locate everything at one point was no longer possible. Instead – and here Troeltsch resembled many other theologians of his time – Christ’s role and significance were centered upon his meaning for faith and the power of his personality: It appears from the whole of its effects and in the personality of its master without doubt to be ethically and religiously the most alive, the richest revelation; this is all that can be proved by science of the revelation in Christianity.102

Faith is less in a particular set of facts than in the recognition of the eternal worth of life, which in Christianity stems from the personality and teaching of Christ, the “name identified with all salvation.”103 Like others, including Wilhelm Herrmann, with whom he was often in disagreement, Troeltsch emphasizes that the “impression of the personality of Jesus as it continues to live, illuminated by the faith of numerous generations, is that which in the end … makes us certain of the knowledge of God.”104 Unlike Herrmann, however, Troeltsch did not see this impression as requiring a special mode of apprehension. Instead, he maintained,

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

445

“God in Christ” can only mean that in Jesus we reverence the highest revelation of God accessible to us and that we make the picture of Jesus the rallying-point of all God’s testimonies to himself found in our sphere of life.105

Similarly, demonstrating the influence of Schleiermacher, Troeltsch claimed, “Every experience shows us that all powers and warmth of the certainty of redemption stand in connection to Jesus and the living community which derives from him.”106 Christ becomes the “rallying-point,” the force for social cohesion: “we hold to what can be attained. We place ourselves under his personality and recognise in him our mystical head.”107 For Troeltsch, the figure of the historical Christ stood at the beginning of the development of Christianity, which brought the powers of redemption into the present. Nature and sin Redemption is viewed by Troeltsch as twofold: first as delivery from the necessary constraints of nature, and second from the consciousness of guilt. Suffering is seen not as the consequence of original sin, but rather is an inexplicable brute fact deriving from natural laws. Redemption conveys the power to overcome these conditions: nature “is augmented” with an ethical and spiritual domain, where human beings become “citizens of a higher world order.”108 Thus the struggle for existence was not the consequence of sin but was given with existence itself: “Without chemical laws our bodies would be unthinkable…. It belongs to the laws of being, that our suffering and joys stem from one and the same source.”109 The second aspect of redemption is from the feeling of guilt which stems from a failure to live up to the demands of the absolute. Such a condition does not result from the Fall, but rather is part of the human constitution and necessary for the development of the ethical personality: the notion of freedom is essential for this concept of sin. Only by consciously acting contrary to God’s will can the human being be said to be guilty of an offense. For Troeltsch, a feeling of guilt is the only punishment and this is overcome in the feeling of redemption, as the finite and absolute wills are united. The idea of reward stems from the human longing for union with the divine will when “we grow finally above the world.”110 The state of perfection is not seen as something lost in the Fall, but as something resting in future final harmonization of the spiritual and the natural aspects of the human personality. This was the “fundamental secret of metaphysics. We have to postulate it, since we cannot know it.”111 The last things This leads Troeltsch to the discussion of eschatology, which he recognized was no longer a popular branch of theology: “the eschatological bureau is mostly

446

MARK D. CHAPMAN

closed nowadays. It is closed because the thought in which it is grounded has lost its roots.”112 Since eschatology resisted rationalization,113 it was only in the sphere of religion that it could receive a proper discussion. Troeltsch recognized two coherent religious approaches to the problem of the “last things.” First, there was the eschatology of pantheism and Buddhism, which did not regard the goal as that of raising up the personality to a new ethical status, but rather saw the goal of life as the attainment of a unity, harmony, and peace above the chaos of nature. Second, there was the distinctive Judeo-Christian eschatology with its perception of the absolute as the goal to be striven for through the continual ethicization of the world. Both offered very real notions of redemption. The first is from that which is divided and relative toward the “whole,” from the changing flux which is the natural world to the unchanging unity of the eternal world. The second offered redemption from confinement in nature toward spiritual freedom. The Christian claim asserted the possibility of something new rising above the causal nexus, even if this contradicted the canons of science: The “new” just cannot be conceived as something scientific. In what sense can there be something which used not to be? Those who represent the position of determinism say: it rests in its antecedents, in its earlier stages; even in the atoms. It is always pushed back further…. Yet each of us is an Other, something unique, a new self!114

For Troeltsch, the decision between these two coherent views of redemption could be made only from the “practical, ethical and religious” standpoint.115 Pantheism leaves everything as it is: life can be seen only in terms of the all-embracing unity, and there can be no possibility of a higher life except by escaping this individualized life altogether and returning to the whole. Troeltsch considers, however, that if relativism is to be overcome in the here and now, this can occur only through a religiosity which allows for the possibility of the absolute “creative, living will” to be united with the human will. An impersonal view of God could never allow such a union. Progress Troeltsch had few delusions that the world was automatically progressing toward its true ends. Indeed, much that was happening appeared to contradict spiritual development. Thus Troeltsch asked, commenting on his experience in America, “In America there is such a virulent racial hatred between blacks and whites that each race has to have its own electric railway; how can we then speak of a unity of humankind?”116 While he claimed to believe in the possibility that things might get better, he did so only on the basis of hope. However advanced the human race might become, history would always be characterized by conflict and self-seeking:

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

447

But beyond this I cannot forget that also in these new future stages of humanity, malice, selfishness, short-sightedness and the pettiness of millions will create the same evil under which we suffer today and under which our ancestors suffered in the past. It must not be forgotten that between the goals of spiritual humanity, and the natural conditions of the world, between the bodily constitution and natural drives, there is a contradiction which has continually to be overcome. There is a whole complex of frictions and constrictions which never allows the essential ethical goal to be fully realized…. In the place of optimism enters not a reactionary pessimism, but a cool realism, which certainly recognises the goal, but finds that it can only ever be partially realised.117

This means that the language of spiritual development can find expression only in religion: the goals of humanity, the end of history cannot find a place in empirical history: “The goal of life can never find its place in earthly life.”118 In religion, history can be viewed as the battle of the ethical powers with the natural and the finite. The Christian affirmation is that in the struggle between good and evil, there is present a power which allows a breakthrough into eternity, which is realized as in each present the human being attempts to overcome its situation and bring about a victory for the ethical personality. In one of his most speculative moments, Troeltsch conjectures about the actual end itself. This is expressed in terms of the measure of participation in the eternal divine life; the completion must be the final return of all things to the divine life. According to Troeltsch, this will be different from the end of the physical world, which will presumably be marked by the waning of the energy of the sun until “finally the last person bakes the last potato on the last coal.”119 Instead the ends of humanity will be marked by a “flowing into one another” in love of the individual and the divine will: “The most complete salvation would be that final moment when the finite nature died and it would be raised above itself and thereby annihilated.”120 The overcoming of natural finite life is “at one and the same time an overcoming of distinct existence and the completion of the union of wills, that is, the end is the return into the divine spirit.”121 Displaying strongly panentheist tendencies, Troeltsch considers that there must be a sense that when creation returns to its creator, God himself is increased: “God is fully God only through his being believed in and loved by finite spirits.”122 Thus creation is completed when it has fully returned to God, which at the same time marks the completion of God: “At this point the truths of the religious speculations of theism and pantheism stand together.”123 Nevertheless there remains one fundamental difference between Christianity and pantheism: the means by which the union with God is accomplished. Christianity retains the notion of spiritual development and of an interaction between the two spheres of spirit and nature. It is thus not world-denying in the sense that the world is viewed as wholly other than the divine. Whatever its point of contact with pantheism, Christianity continues to affirm theism and the possibility of spiritual development; for Troeltsch – as for other panentheists – pantheism is of interest only at the end of creation.

448

MARK D. CHAPMAN

Crucially for Troeltsch, the human personality develops in the historical world not by overcoming it but by ethicizing it. While the completion of this process must remain in some unknowable sphere, there are nonetheless genuine beginnings in history. In short, the eternal and absolute can make itself known in time, and does not require a complete destruction of the temporal world, as it must in pantheism.124 The re-unification of everything with God is not something “merely spiritual,” but is vitally involved with the historical world, as God’s justice is established everywhere.125 The choice is thus between, on the one hand, the optimistic recognition of the possibility of spiritual values in history, admittedly only as beginnings, but with the hope of the goal of a completion in some place and at some stage quite unknown to us;126 and, on the other hand, the pessimism of pantheism (and, for Troeltsch, Buddhism), where there can be no notion of human creativity. Thus, although today’s eschatological myths must evidently take account of the modern perception of the vastness of the universe, and can no longer rest solely with the biblical or church tradition, they will nevertheless always remain powerful myths, which open up possibilities for the mastery of the ethical life. Religion provides the power for the adoption of absolute ends, the union of the human will in conformity with the divine will. Such a union does not take place merely in some mystic realm, but has its beginnings in the historical world.

Conclusion Troeltsch’s theology is built on his understanding of history as the sphere in which God is disclosed to humankind. Religious experience is not something separate from other experience, but is always realized in the concrete realities of history. Similarly, the absolute was always disclosed in the relative. While this always resulted in compromise – and Troeltsch was sometimes accused of betraying the purity of the Gospel127 – Troeltsch remained convinced that the alternatives were far worse and would lead to ethical irrelevance. Thus, even though his theological system is often vague and excessively speculative, its contours are nevertheless clear, and pave the way for much of his later writing on the philosophy of history, where again his concerns were over how absolute values could be expressed within the relativities of history.128 Troeltsch was far less willing than most of his colleagues in the History of Religion School, as well as his opponents outside, to take refuge in a religion of flight from the world. Indeed, his championship of the importance of the realization of the absolute in the relative thrust him into constructive politics after the First World War: others, however, were far more reluctant to participate in the democratic system since they could not bear the compromises involved. Ultimately, of course, this had disastrous consequences for the historical world. Troeltsch’s legacy is difficult to measure: he founded no school; his form of constructive theology was challenged by Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Friedrich

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

449

Gogarten, and the other dialectical theologians; his pantheistic tendencies look decidedly dated; and his theology of compromise was under attack from those who saw it as inevitably tainted by its association with militarism and the slaughter of the First World War. His wider thought, however, has continued to exert a lasting influence: his Social Teaching remains a foundational text for the sociology of religious organization and for the study of influence of religion on society. Many of his ideas were mediated into the English-speaking world partly through the writings of H. Richard Niebuhr. Similarly, the refusal to isolate Christianity from its wider religious and historical background, something that Troeltsch shared with the other members of the History of Religion School, remains of lasting importance for biblical studies: many of the recent sociological readings of the Bible show a marked affinity with the methods used by the pioneers from the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps most importantly, Troeltsch remains a dialogue partner in any theological discussion of the philosophy of history, especially among those interested in the relationship between faith, history, and reason: his huge work on the problems of historicism is about to be published in an English translation.129 The wider implications of this sort of rigorous philosophical thinking might still influence those interested in developing a “public theology” as they seek to address the relationships between the highest ends of human life expressed in religion and the structures of society. In a world where the public expression of religion resolutely refuses to disappear, the complexities of Troeltsch’s theology of cultural synthesis, especially as this relates to the interactions between Europe and the rest of the world, may still have something important to contribute to theology and religious studies. What Troeltsch could not have imagined, however, was the extraordinarily pluralist situation of the contemporary world: the idea of “Europeanism” with which he concluded his life work is nowadays very different indeed.

Notes 1 For reasons that will become clear, I have translated religionsgeschichtliche Schule accurately as “History of Religion School.” 2 On Bousset, see A. F. Verheule, Wilhelm Bousset. Leben und Werk. Ein Theologiegeschichtlicher Versuch (Amsterdam: Ton Bolland, 1973). 3 Wilhelm Bousset, “Die Religionsgeschichte und das neue Testament,” ThR VII (1904), 265–277, 311–318, 353–365, 364–365. 4 Wilhelm Bousset, “Die ‘kleine Göttinger Fakultät’ von 1890,” Die christliche Welt, 34 (1920), cols. 281–283, col. 282. 5 On Gunkel, see H. Klatt, Hermann Gunkel. Zu seiner Theologie der Religionsgeschichte und zur Entstehung der formgeschichtlichen Methode, FRLANT, 100 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969); and J. C. O’Neill, The Bible’s Authority: A Portrait Gallery of Thinkers from Lessing to Bultmann (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), 231–247.

450

MARK D. CHAPMAN

6 On Weiss, see Berthold Lannert, Die Wiederentdeckung der neutestamentlichen Eschatologie durch Johannes Weiss (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1989). 7 On Wrede, see A. Wrede in W. Wrede, Vorträge und Studien (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1907), iii–xiv. 8 On Eichhorn, see Hugo Greßmann, Eichhorn und die religionsgeschichtliche Schule (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914). 9 Greßmann, Eichhorn, 25. 10 Hermann Gunkel, “Gedächtnisrede an Wilhelm Bousset,” Evangelische Freiheit, 10 (1920), 141–162, 158. 11 Ernst Troeltsch, “Geschichte und Metaphysik,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 8 (1898), 1–69, 53–54. I have referred to standard translations of Troeltsch where available, although most translations are my own. 12 Bernhard Duhm, Über Ziel und Methode der theologischen Wissenschaft (Basel: Schweigerhauser, 1889), 7. 13 Bernhard Duhm, Die Theologie der Propheten als Grundlage für die innere Entwicklungsgeschichte der Israelitischen Religion (Bonn: Marcus, 1875). 14 Albrecht Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, 3 vols (Bonn: Marcus, 1880–6). 15 Hermann Gunkel, Israel und Babylonien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903), 36. 16 Hermann Gunkel, Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes nach der populären Anschauung der apostolischen Zeit und der Lehre des Apostels Paulus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1888; 2nd ed., 1899), xi. 17 See, for instance, H. Weinel, Die Wirkungen des Geistes und der Geister im nachapostolischen Zeitalter bis auf Irenäus (Freiburg-i-Br: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1899); A. Eichhorn, Das Abendmahl im neuen Testament, Supplement to CW, 36 (Freiburg and Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1898); and W. Heitmüller, Taufe und Abendmahl bei Paulus. Darstellung und religionsgeschichtliche Beleutung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903). 18 Wrede, Vorträge und Studien, 66. 19 Wrede, Vorträge und Studien, 65, 77. 20 Bousset, “Die Religionsgeschichte und das neue Testament,” 271. 21 Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos. Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus, 5th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), x–xi; and John E. Steely, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1970). 22 Hermann Gunkel, Reden und Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913), v–vi. 23 Gunkel, Die Wirkungen, 96. 24 Wilhelm Bousset, Die Lehre des Apostels Paulus vom Gesetz, (unveröffentliche Göttinger Habilitationsschrift, 1890), ed. Horst Renz, Mitteilungen der Ernst-TroeltschGesellschaft, IV (1989), 84–139, here 119. 25 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 93. 26 Ibid., 154. 27 Ibid., 93. 28 Wilhelm Bousset, Unser Gottesglaube (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1908), 12. 29 Hermann Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903), 95.

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

451

Gunkel, Die Wirkungen, 14. Ibid., viii. Ibid., 43. Wilhelm Bousset, Das Wesen der Religion, 3rd ed. (Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1906), 17; and Wilhelm Bousset, What Is Religion? trans. F. B. Law (London: Unwin, 1907). Wilhelm Bousset, “Kantisch-Fries’sche Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie,” ThR, XII (1909), 419–436, 471–488, 479. Bousset, What Is Religion? 263. Bousset, Das Wesen der Religion, 17. Ernst Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the ‘Religionsgeschichtlichen Schule’,” American Journal of Theology, 17, 1–21, 1–2. Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, ed. David Reid (London: SCM, 1972), 25. Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics,” 1. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 12–13. Ernst Troeltsch, “Review of Second International Congress for the History of Religion,” Deutsche Literaturzeitung 26 (1905), col. 2760. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, ed. Olive Wyon (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), 985 n. 504a. This incident is reported in Walter Köhler, Ernst Troeltsch (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1941), 1. Review of Johannes Steinbeck, Das Verhältnis von Theologie und Erkenntnistheorie (1898), Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 22 (1901) cols. 710–712, col. 712. Troeltsch, “Geschichte und Metaphysik,” 8. Ibid., 10; and Ernst Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology” (1900), in Ernst Troeltsch, Religion in History, ed. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), 25. Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, 122. Ernst Troeltsch, “Christentum und Religionsgeschichte” (1897) in Zur religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie und Ethik (Gesammelte Schriften (GS) II) (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]), 328–363, here 349. Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, 21. Cf. Troeltsch, “Christentum und Religionsgeschichte,” 336; and Troeltsch, “Geschichte und Metaphysik,” 6. Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method,” 14. Ibid., 13–15. Ibid., 12. Ernst Troeltsch, “On the Question of the Religious Apriori” (1909) in Religion in History, 33–45, here 44. Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, 107. Ernst Troeltsch, “Religionsphilosophie,” in Die Philosophie im Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Festschrift for Kuno Fischer, ed. Wilhelm Windelband (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1904), 104–162, here 143. Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, 65.

452

MARK D. CHAPMAN

60 A. von Harnack, Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1901); and A. von Harnack, What Is Christianity? trans. T. B. Saunders (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 8. 61 von Harnack, What is Christianity? 8. 62 Ernst Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre. Nach Heidelberger Vorlesungen aus den Jahren 1911 und 1912 (München and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1925); and Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, trans. Garrett Paul (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), § 2.2. (References to section numbers are to the dictated passages.) On this, see Lori Pearson, Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Religion (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 63 Ernst Troeltsch, “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” (1903) in Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, ed. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (Atlanta, GA: John Knox, 1977), 124–179, here 141. 64 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” 143. 65 Troeltsch, “Religionsphilosophie,” 143. 66 Ernst Troeltsch, “Prinzip, religiöses,” Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG1) (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1913), vol. 4, cols. 1499–1503, col. 1842. 67 See, for example, Troeltsch, “Geschichte und Metaphysik,” 41, 45, 46; and Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, chap. 2, esp. 77. 68 Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, 86. 69 Ernst Troeltsch, “Die christliche Weltanschauung und ihre Gegenströmungen” (1894) in GS II, 227–327, here 311. 70 Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, 106. 71 Ibid., 147. 72 Ernst Troeltsch, “Modern Philiosophy of History” (1903), in Religion in History, 273–320, here 296. 73 Review of Th. Kaftan, Ernst Tröltsch. Eine kritische Zeitstudie (1912), Theologische Literaturzeitung, 37 (1912), cols. 724–728, here col. 728. 74 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” 168. 75 See Troeltsch, The Absoluteness, 121, 127, 135, 136, 160. 76 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” 169; see also Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 82. 77 Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 47. 78 Ibid., 38. 79 See “An Apple from the Tree of Kierkegaard,” in The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, ed. J. M. Robinson (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1968), 314–315. 80 Troeltsch, “Prinzip,” col. 1844. 81 Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, § 3.4. 82 Ibid., § 12.2. 83 Ibid., 137. 84 Ernst Troeltsch, “Gnade Gottes III: Dogmatisch” in RGG1, vol. 2, cols. 1469–1474, here col. 1470. 85 Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, § 12.4. 86 Troeltsch, “Gnade Gottes III,” col. 1471. 87 Ibid., col. 1473. 88 Troeltsch, “Praktische christliche Ethik” (lectures, Winter Semester 1911–1912), in Mitteilungen der Ernst-Troeltsch-Gesellschaft VI (1991), 129–174, here 152. 89 Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, §l.

HISTORY OF RELIGION SCHOOL

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

453

Troeltsch, “Gnade Gottes III,” col.1474. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 135. Ernst Troeltsch, “Prädestination III” in RGG1, vol. 4, cols. 1706–1712, col. 1708. Troeltsch, “Prädestination III,” col. 1708. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 135. Ibid., 140. Troeltsch, “Prädestination III,” cols. 1709–1710. Ibid., col. 1711. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 132. Ernst Troeltsch, “Erlösung II: dogmatisch” in RGG1, vol. 2, cols. 481–488, col. 482. Troeltsch, “Erlösung II,” col. 483. Ibid., col. 484 Ernst Troeltsch, “Offenbarung III: dogmatisch” in RGG1, vol. 4, cols. 918–922, here col. 920. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 29. Troeltsch, “Erlösung II,” col. 487. Ernst Troeltsch, “The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith” (1911), in Morgan and Pye, Ernst Troeltsch, 182–207, here 206. Troeltsch, “Erlösung II,” col. 487. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 100. Troeltsch, “Erlösung II,” col. 485. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 189. Troeltsch, “Erlösung II,” col. 486. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 240. Ibid., 38. Ernst Troeltsch, “Eschatologie IV. Dogmatisch” in RGG1, vol. 2, cols. 622–632, here col. 622. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 151. Troeltsch, “Eschatologie IV,” col. 627. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 234. Ernst Troeltsch, “Ethik und Kapitalismus”: Review article on Gottfried Traub, Grundzüge einer Sozialethik (1904), Die christliche Welt 19 (1905), cols. 320–326, cols. 325–326. Troeltsch, “Ethik und Kapitalismus,” col. 325. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 234. Troeltsch, “Eschatologie IV,” col. 630. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, § 14.3c. Ibid., 192. Ibid., § 14.3c. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 160. Ibid., § 14.3c. Karl Barth, “Evangelical Theology in the Nineteenth Century” (1956), in The Humanity of God (London: Collins, 1961), 11–33. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (GSIII) (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1922). By Garrett Paul (forthcoming).

454

MARK D. CHAPMAN

Bibliography Chapman, Mark D. Religion, Ethics and the History of Religion School. Scottish Journal of Theology, 46 (1993): 43–78. Chapman, Mark D. Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany, Christian Theology in Context series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Clayton, J. P. (ed.). Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Coakley, Sarah. Christ Without Absolutes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Drescher, H-G. Ernst Troeltsch: His Life and Work. London: SCM, 1992. Graf, F. W., and H. Ruddies. Ernst Troeltsch Bibliographie. Tübingen: Mohr, 1982. Kümmel, W. G. The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems. London: SCM Press, 1972, 245–324. Lüdemann, Gerd. Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in Göttingen. Eine Dokumentation. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987. Pearson, Lori. Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Riches, John K. A Century of New Testament Study. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1993, 14–49.

CHAPTER 22

The Bible and Theology John W. Rogerson

It was the continent of Europe, and in particular its German-speaking parts, that was responsible for the changes and challenges to how the Bible was interpreted in the nineteenth century. Britain and America (New England) first resisted and later embraced these challenges, albeit with modifications that were dictated by local factors. The account can be divided into three periods: 1800–1835, 1835– 1860, and 1860–1899.

1800–1835 The closing decades of the eighteenth century had seen the beginnings of the emergence of modern critical biblical scholarship in Germany (the German states until 1870; Germany thereafter). This had become possible because of the freeing of biblical scholarship from the need to be bound by doctrinal and ecclesiastical formularies. It was no accident that the pioneers of the movement had come from pietist circles. These would be blamed in the nineteenth century by the defenders of orthodoxy for having assisted the birth of biblical criticism by being indifferent to doctrine, and by concentrating at its expense upon religious experience. It was in Jena from 1805 to 1807 that a decisive breakthrough was made that would determine the course of subsequent biblical study, even though the effects of the breakthrough were not generally recognized until later in the century. The man responsible was Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, a young man who combined an acutely sharp critical sense with a mystical, poetical feeling for literature and religion. His dissertation on Deuteronomy, presented in March 1805, contained a long footnote which anticipated the view of the history of Israelite religion and sacrifice that would be given classical expression by Julius Wellhausen in 1878. Wellhausen, indeed, described de Wette as “the epoch-making initiator of historical criticism in this field.”1 Basically, de Wette

456

JOHN W. ROGERSON

stood the Old Testament on its head by arguing that the Israelite system of sacrifice had developed gradually over time and had not been instituted early in Israel’s existence by Moses. De Wette followed up his dissertation with a twovolume work which argued that the books of Chronicles were entirely dependent upon the books of Samuel and Kings and that their view of the history of Israelite religion was unreliable. He also argued that many of the traditions in Genesis through Numbers were “mythical,” by which he meant partly that they were narratives that gave literary expression to the religious ideas that were held by those who composed them. They could not be used to reconstruct history. De Wette later turned his attentions to the New Testament and in 1815 composed a Latin essay on the death of Christ, which argued that Christ had not understood his death as an atoning sacrifice. The Old Testament and Judaism knew nothing of an atoning death of a Messiah. This interpretation had been contributed by the early church. De Wette, at this stage in his life, was doubtful whether Jesus had risen from the dead. De Wette’s theology, which both made possible and was influenced by his biblical work, owed much to the post-Kantian philosophy of Jakob Friedrich Fries, which located religion in aesthetic experience such as the sublime. Several scholars, notably the great Hebrew philologist and lexicographer W. Gesenius, C. P. W. Gramberg, J. F. L. George, and P. von Bohlen, took up de Wette’s position on the history of Old Testament sacrifice and religion, and began to develop it in various directions. That it took fifty years for his ideas to gain more widespread acceptance was due to a number of factors. The growth of what was regarded in orthodox circles as rationalism in German biblical scholarship caused great concern, especially to the pietistically inclined rulers of Prussia. In 1817, a seminary was established in Wittenberg with the specific aim of providing an education for clergy that was not tainted with rationalism. In 1830, the 300th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession brought a renewed emphasis on the importance of dogmatic formulae, and on the need for biblical scholarship not to contradict or undermine them. Second, de Wette had, in any case, been denied any influence he might have had by being dismissed from his post in Berlin in 1819 for his involvement with radical student and other movements that wanted to establish a united and democratic Germany following the defeat of Napoleon. He spent the remainder of his life in Basel, Switzerland. Third, a work was published in 1835 by Wilhelm Vatke which embraced much of de Wette’s approach, but which caused such an uproar that its author was denied the academic recognition and promotion which he deserved. Vatke’s Biblische Theologie began with an opening section of 170 pages on the nature of religion, based upon his study of the philosophy of Hegel and so dense and abstruse that even some of his professional colleagues confessed that they could not understand it. There followed over four hundred pages of an account of the history and development of Old Testament religion that was even more negative than de Wette’s work when measured against the picture given in the Old Testament itself. A key principle of Vatke’s approach, taken

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

457

from Hegel, was that religion developed from the lower to the higher. In the case of the Old Testament, its religion developed from the nature and astral religion of Israel’s Egyptian sojourn, through a growing awareness of individual spirituality in the great prophets of the eighth century onward, to its high point in the Persian period, where it was characterized by the piety expressed in the Psalms. This meant that only a very limited role could be ascribed to the work of Moses, and that whereas de Wette (as was also later the case with Wellhausen) made a distinction between what he regarded as the prophetic Hebrew religion of the pre-exilic period and the legalistic Judaism of the post-exilic period, Vatke argued for an unbroken development of Israel’s religion from the lower to the higher. Although Vatke’s work imposed upon the Old Testament a preconceived scheme derived from Hegel, it was full of critical acumen, and distinguished by the extent to which it drew upon the emerging study of comparative religion. His Biblische Theologie was not the only work to produce shock waves in 1835. An even bigger impact was made that same year by D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus. This, too, owed something to de Wette in that Strauss made use of the concept of myth, and like de Wette was concerned more to discover the religious significance of narratives about Jesus, rather than to use them for the purposes of reconstructing his life. Strauss defined New Testament myths as “the expression of primitive Christian ideas formulated in unintentionally poeticizing sagas and looking very like history.”2 One of his most lasting contributions to biblical scholarship was his attack upon the reliability of John’s Gospel as a source for reconstructing the life of Jesus. Scholarship of the time distinguished the eyewitness Gospels, Matthew and John, from the non-eyewitness Gospels, Mark and Luke. Strauss’s attack, which certainly convinced de Wette, challenged scholarship to use only the Synoptic Gospels as a source for the life of Jesus. By 1835, then, there had emerged in German scholarship critical positions relating to the Bible that were more radical than anything that would later come to be established in Old Testament study, and almost as radical in what would transpire in later New Testament study. In Britain (especially England), these developments were viewed with considerable alarm and attempts were made by scholars such as E. B. Pusey, E. H. Dewar, and H. J. Rose to warn the ecclesiastical establishment about the dangers posed by German rationalist scholarship. Chilling descriptions of empty churches or small, bewildered congregations in Germany were adduced as proof of the pernicious effects of German rationalism. More importantly, biblical criticism was seen as an attack on Christian doctrines such as the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ. Because Jesus had affirmed the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (e.g., in Mark 10:3–4), to doubt it was to deny his divinity. To interpret Isaiah 7:14 in the context of eighth-century BCE Jerusalem rather than to understand it, along with Matthew 1:23, as a prophecy of Christ’s virgin birth, was a further indication of the danger of historical criticism to Christian doctrine and belief.

458

JOHN W. ROGERSON

1835–1860 This period saw a conservative reaction against the “negative criticism” practiced by scholars such as de Wette and Vatke on the Old Testament. In the New Testament field, there were further radical developments, especially those associated with a one-time teacher of Strauss, F. C. Baur. The reaction against de Wette and Vatke took four forms. The first, found in the work of E. W. Hengstenberg, de Wette’s ultimate successor in the Berlin chair, used all the resources of scholarship to defend traditional positions regarding the history of Israelite religion and the authorship of the books of the Old Testament. One of Hengstenberg’s most important works was entitled Christology of the Old Testament, and it tried to demonstrate (against de Wette) that belief in an atoning Messiah was integral to the Old Testament, and that it found fulfilment in the death of Jesus. Hengstenberg found such favor with the ruling elite in Prussia that he was able to influence university appointments in Prussia for a generation and to ensure that posts were filled, whenever possible, by scholars who upheld traditional orthodoxy. The second challenge came not from conservative, but from critical circles. Heinrich Ewald, an immensely learned, independent, principled, but stubbornly egotistical scholar, was totally committed to critical methods, but convinced that de Wette and Vatke had used them wrongly. His History of Israel, which began to appear in 1843, and which ran to many volumes and revised editions, was not only the first modern critical work of the genre; it also presented a picture of Israel’s history and religion that was much closer to that contained in the Old Testament. It gave ammunition to opponents of the “negative criticism,” but it also had the important effect of persuading impartial observers that historical criticism did not necessarily yield “negative” results. An important feature of Ewald’s work was the belief that “history” could be seen as a process in which God was at work, leading the human race from lower to higher apprehensions of religion and morality. This belief was part of a wider discovery of the significance of “history” in the nineteenth century, which had received powerful expression in B. G. Niebuhr’s History of Rome (1811–1812) and was also apparent in the philosophy of Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. One of the few scholars to gain Ewald’s approval was C. C. J. Bunsen, one of whose major works was entitled God in History, and whose researches included ancient Egypt as well as ancient Israel. Bunsen, whose wife was British, and who had diplomatic and ecclesiastical contacts with Britain, helped to lessen the suspicions against biblical criticism in some British circles. A group of liberal Anglicans, including Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall (they were joint translators of Niebuhr’s History of Rome), were prepared to see German criticism in a new light, and willing to learn from it. On the fringes of the ecclesiastical establishment in Britain, the Unitarians were more open than any other group to developments in Germany. One of their number, a young woman aged twenty-three, Mary Anne Evans (later known as the novelist George Eliot), translated Strauss’s Life of Jesus, the work appearing in 1846.

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

459

The third challenge to “negative” Old Testament criticism came from J. C. K. von Hofmann. He was a product of the revival movement (Erweckungsbewegung) of the first part of the nineteenth century in Germany, but rather than following the line of Hengstenberg, he developed a distinctive approach to using the Bible. Again, it was the category of “history” that was important, which Hofmann believed concealed and revealed (to faith) God’s purposes in bringing people to the experience and knowledge of salvation. Hofmann saw the Bible as “saving history” (Heilsgeschichte), by which he meant that it was the special history of God’s progressive disclosure of his character to Israel. Because it was God’s history, the history contained in the Bible was privileged and could not be questioned by critical studies. However, Hofmann’s working out of this viewpoint was highly original, and brought him into conflict with orthodox scholars such as Hengstenberg. Thus, whereas for Hengstenberg Old Testament prophecies were supernaturally revealed forecasts that received their fulfilment centuries later in Christ, for Hofmann, they had to be interpreted within their historical contexts. It was biblical history as a whole that was prophetic, in that there was an organic relationship between each segment of history and what preceded and followed it. In each age prophets spoke to their own generation, but also prepared the people for the next phase of history, culminating in the coming of Christ. Again, whereas Hengstenberg upheld the traditional view of the fall of mankind in Adam and the necessity of Christ’s atoning death as a sacrifice for sin, Hofmann minimized the effects of the Fall and of Christ’s sufferings. The human dilemma was not that humanity was alienated from God; it was alienated from itself and needed Christ to come to demonstrate perfect humanity, in fellowship with God. Hofmann demonstrates the variety and creativity of quasi-orthodox German scholarships of the period. The fourth challenge came from another scholar who demonstrates the variety of orthodoxy in Germany in this period, Franz Delitzsch. Much closer in outlook to Hengstenberg than to Hofmann, he was unusual in that he was greatly influenced by the theology of the Roman Catholic Anton Günther. Günther had attempted to use contemporary speculative philosophy in the service of theology, an effort that led to his condemnation by his church in 1857. (Some of his followers later became founding members of the Old Catholic Church.) The second volume of Günther’s Preparatory School of Speculative Theology presented biblical history as a dialectic between God’s work of redemption and the constant misuse of human freedom. God had chosen Israel from among the nations to be an instrument for the salvation of all. Günther enabled Delitzsch to find a path between Hengstenberg and Hofmann. He was able to interpret biblical prophecy realistically, in terms of its historical settings, but also to place it within a traditional scheme of Fall and redemption. It was, indeed, as a commentator on the prophetic books of the Old Testament that Delitzsch excelled, and several editions of his commentary on Isaiah were translated into English. Such was his learning that he could be appealed to in orthodox circles in Britain as a representative of German scholarship that revealed the deficiencies of the “rationalist” critics. Later in the century, Delitzsch cooperated with C. F. Keil to produce a commentary on the whole Old Testament

460

JOHN W. ROGERSON

which became one of the most successful and influential works of conservative scholarship of the nineteenth century. It is still available in print and in electronic form. In later life Delitzsch was prepared to come to terms with critical scholarship, provided it did not question basic Christian truths. If Old Testament scholarship in Germany opposed “negative criticism” in various ways during this period, New Testament scholarship moved in a radical direction with F. C. Baur. The beginnings of his position appeared in an article in 1831, which drew attention to the opposition in Corinth between Paul and the “Judaizers.” Further publications led to a book on Paul in 1845, which maintained that the accounts of Paul’s mission as contained in the Acts of the Apostles were at variance with what could be discerned from Paul’s letters, of which only four – Romans 1 and 2, Corinthians, and Galatians – were genuine writings of the apostle. Acts, in fact, falsified the earliest history of Christianity in order to minimize the differences between Pauline and Jewish Christianity. A book on the Gospels two years later confirmed Strauss’s view that John’s Gospel could not be a source for the life of Jesus, but went further in singling out Matthew from the Synoptics as the most reliable historical source, particularly because of its Jewish coloring. That Mark, not Matthew, was the earlier Gospel had been argued by Karl Lachmann in 1835, and would later become the accepted view in critical scholarship. For the moment, however, Matthean priority was a foundation stone of Baur’s position, which, in its most developed form, dated many of the New Testament letters to the second century CE and sought to trace the development of Christianity from its Jewish roots via Paulinism to the compromise set out in Acts, and developed in later parts of the New Testament such as the Pastoral and General Epistles. In Britain, the period was characterized by developments in Old rather than New Testament studies. Initially, it was in Unitarian circles that radical views were proposed, in particular by an anonymously published work by F. W. Newman, A History of the Hebrew Monarchy (1857). Newman shrewdly analyzed the contradictions in the accounts of Saul’s rise to the kingship in 1 Samuel, and took a negative view of the value of the books of Chronicles. His treatment of Josiah’s reform argued that prior to it, the Mosaic law was unknown in published form in Israel, and that the reform, based partly upon Deuteronomy, was the beginning of a process that led to the gradual development of the Pentateuch in its final form. There were strong echoes of de Wette and anticipations of Wellhausen in this. Newman’s position was too radical to find acceptance in Britain. One of Newman’s critics was F. D. Maurice, a transitional figure, who was unhappy with many aspects of biblical criticism, but whose own published sermons could contain sentiments that were far from orthodox interpretations of the Bible. For example, Maurice’s treatment of the opening chapters of Genesis was highly original and unorthodox: Genesis 1 did not describe the creation of the world by God, and any attempt to reconcile the account with science ran the risk of misrepresenting science and missing the point of what Genesis 1 was about. What it revealed was the creation as it was in the mind of God. The purpose of the “days” of creation was to lead to the seventh day, the Sabbath, the observance of which became a

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

461

reminder to Israel that God was the true lord of the universe, not the human race. The purpose of Genesis 1 was to inspire reverence, not speculation about cosmic origins. Maurice recognized a separate creation account in Genesis 2, but not on the source-critical grounds that had been proposed in the eighteenth century. The purpose of Genesis 2 was to relate that what had been in the mind of God in Genesis 1 became actuality. In 1853, Maurice was dismissed from his position at King’s College, London, but this was not on account of his views on the Old Testament. The offense was caused, in his Theological Essays, by the suggestion that punishment in the afterlife was not everlasting. Dismissal from a post because of historical-critical views was the fate that overtook Samuel Davison in 1857. Davidson was employed at the Lancashire Independent College near Manchester, and in 1856 had, at the request of the publishers of T. H. Horne’s Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, rewritten the second volume, under the title The Text of the Old Testament. He had previously published a book on Sacred Hermeneutics (1843) which was distinguished by its knowledge of, and interaction with, German critical scholarship. In fact, Davidson’s contribution to Horne’s work was very orthodox when compared with de Wette and Vatke. He did, however, allow that the biblical writers were not infallible on every matter of historical detail, and that while Moses had certainly written parts of the Pentateuch he had not written all of it. He accepted that the Pentateuch contained an Elohim document, written in the time of Joshua, and a Jehovah document, written during the period of the Judges. On other matters he upheld the unity of authorship of the whole of Isaiah and the book of Daniel, and defended the independence and reliability of the books of Chronicles. It seems incredible that Davidson should have been dismissed from his post for holding such mild critical views, but the incident is an indicator of opinion at the time in part of British non-conformist circles. During this period in North America (New England), it was Unitarian circles that pioneered the introduction of critical biblical scholarship, and it was de Wette’s work that provided the impetus. De Wette was visited in 1844 in his Basel exile by Theodore Parker, and in 1850 Parker published a handsome two-volume work entitled A Critical and Historical Introduction … to the Old Testament from the German of Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette. In fact it was much more than a translation of the fifth (1840) edition of de Wette’s Einleitung. It contained extensive comments and notes supplied by Parker himself, who, in his introduction, acknowledged his indebtedness to Ewald, Ferdinand Hitzig, and Friedrich Tuch, among others. Nothing comparable was to be had in Britain at this time.

1860–1899 On the continent of Europe, this period was important for the establishment of the critical positions that underlay the two great works of Wellhausen – his History of Israel (1878), and its second and better-known edition, the Prolegomena

462

JOHN W. ROGERSON

to the History of Israel (1883). What was needed for this to happen was a shift in the view of what scholarship called the Grundschrift or basic narrative (later known as P), a priestly composition that ran from Genesis 1 to the book of Numbers, and contained narratives and laws about priesthood and sacrifice. This was generally held to be earlier than two sources ascribed to Elohist and Yahwist writers, the names deriving from variations in the use of the name for God. The change that was needed was for the Grundschrift to be dated as the latest of the sources that made up the Pentateuch. This shift occurred between 1860 and 1878 and was contributed to by a number of scholars, including the Dutch modernist A. Kuenen (who was himself influenced by the British scholar J. W. Colenso), K. H. Graf, B. Duhm, T. Nöldeke, and A. Kayser. Kayser and Graf had been students of the Strasbourg scholar E. Reuss, who had apparently expressed an opinion about the lateness of the Mosaic code as early as 1834. Wellhausen reached the same conclusion in a series of detailed articles on the composition of the Pentateuch that were published between 1876 and 1877 and established the today well-known formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis in terms of the four sources J, E, D, and P, which had been written in that order. In the articles, Wellhausen rejected the idea that the sources had been put together by “scissors and paste,” and he argued that the sources had been subject to supplementation. The position established by his analysis of the composition of the Pentateuch became the basis for his epoch-making account of Israel’s history, an account already outlined by de Wette in 1805. Its brilliance owed something to the way in which the four sources were linked to three periods of Israel’s history. The Jahwist and Elohist sources (also the books of Samuel and Kings) reflected a period in which there was no centralized worship or priesthood in Israel. The reform of Josiah in 622, connected with Deuteronomy, marked the beginnings of the centralization of worship in Jerusalem; while the Priestly Code, reflecting the post-exilic situation in Jerusalem, projected the religious practices of that later period back into the time of Moses. The true founders of Israelite monotheism were the prophets. The prophets pre-dated the law. For the remainder of the century, continental scholarship had to deal with Wellhausen, either by extending and refining his basic position, or by taking issue with it by defending the early dating of the Grundschrift. Wellhausen himself turned to Arabian studies in the 1880s, and, at the end of the century, to New Testament study. A subject for which he had less interest was the newly emerging discipline of Assyriology, which, from the 1870s, began to place the Old Testament within the wider context of the history and literature of ancient Assyria and Babylonia. The discovery and decipherment of the Assyriological material gave rise in Germany to a “history of religion” movement. This traced the history and development of Old Testament religion against the background of the greater scholarly knowledge of the ancient Near East. One of the most notable publications to emerge from this approach was H. Gunkel’s Creation and Chaos (1895). This exploited the similarity between the creation and other narratives of the early chapters of Genesis and the Babylonian traditions of

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

463

creation and the flood, as well as the presence of mythological motifs in later Jewish apocalyptic, and drew conclusions about the history and development of Old Testament religion from this perspective. The major New Testament concerns in Germany in this period were with the nature of the mission of Jesus and his own consciousness of that mission. Under the influence of A. Harnack and A. Ritschl, who were not primarily New Testament scholars, a view of Jesus emerged as a moral teacher who bore witness to the kingdom of God, which was a moral transformation of the individual and of society. This “liberal” view of Jesus began to be challenged as the century ended by an eschatological view, inspired by a “history of religion” approach. This placed Jesus against the background of contemporary Jewish apocalyptic as it was then known, and emphasized those elements in the teaching of Jesus that seemed to expect the imminent end of the age. The major contribution was that of J. Weiss, and his 1892 Jesus’s Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. According to Weiss, Jesus believed that the kingdom of God was already breaking in to the world, and that he (Jesus) was playing and would play a leading role in its establishment. He came to believe further that his death would be the means of its coming, and that he would return as the exalted Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. This would take place within the lifetime of his generation. When this did not happen, his followers, drawing upon concepts and beliefs in the Hellenistic world, transformed Christianity with the worship of the divine Christ who would come in judgment at the end of time. Weiss’s views would be developed further in the following century by A. Schweitzer. The period was a turbulent one for the British churches because, having built intellectual dikes against the incoming tide of German biblical criticism, they could no longer maintain them, and found themselves increasingly swept along by it. The point was that German biblical criticism was grounded in the content of the Bible and genuine questions that that content raised. The questions demanded answers, and it was no longer sufficient to plead that answering them might be damaging to traditional beliefs. The 1860s saw three major events. The first was the publication in 1860 of Essays and Reviews, seven essays on various ecclesiastical subjects, six of which were contributed by Anglican clergyman. Although it contained no radical treatment of the Bible, it was a sign of the times, in that it indicated a willingness on the part of some Anglicans to face up to the kinds of questions that had been discussed – in Germany, for example – for many years previously. An essay by R. Williams on the work of C. C. J. Bunsen drew attention to the moderately critical positions adopted by that scholar, such as that the Pentateuch was not entirely written by Moses; that books such as Isaiah, Zechariah, and Daniel had had more than one author; and that prophecies traditionally understood as forecasts of the coming of Christ (e.g., Isaiah 7:14) were to be interpreted in their historical contexts. An essay by C. W. Goodwin argued that the “science” implicit in the account of creation in Genesis 1 was the science of the time of its composition, not a science that could be reconciled with modern discoveries, while the essay by

464

JOHN W. ROGERSON

B. Jowett coined the famous slogan that the Bible must be interpreted “like any other book.” Such was the reaction to the volume that two “orthodox” replies, Aids to Faith and Replies to Essays and Reviews, were published in 1861 and 1862 respectively, and that two contributors to Essays and Reviews were arraigned before the Court of Arches, an ecclesiastical tribunal. Hot on the heels of Essays and Reviews came The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua (1862) from the pen of the Anglican Bishop of Natal, J. W. Colenso. This was the first of seven parts that appeared between 1862 and 1879, and that showed Colenso to be a formidable and fearless Old Testament critic. This was not how his contemporaries viewed him, and during his lifetime he was much more respected on the Continent than in Britain. Part 1 in 1862 caused an outrage because it was an unadulterated attack on the historicity of the narrative of the exodus and wilderness wanderings in Exodus and Numbers. Several passages gave the numbers of those leaving Egypt as 600,000 males aged twenty and upward. Colenso calculated that this would mean a total of roughly 2.5 million Israelites together with 2 million sheep and oxen. This was a remarkable increase in population from the seventy souls who went down to Egypt with Jacob (Genesis 46:27), and the company would have taken quite a long time to cross the Red Sea. Colenso had done nothing new. The same observations had been made by S. H. Reimarus, in a fragment published in 1777 by G. E. Lessing. The offense was that it had been done by an Anglican bishop, who had impugned both the integrity of the Bible and the power of God to sustain otherwise inexplicable events. Soon after the appearance of part 1, Colenso entered into a long-lasting correspondence with the Dutch scholar A. Kuenen. It was Colenso who helped to convince Kuenen of the lateness of the narrative parts of the Grundschrift, although Colenso himself did not draw this conclusion. The third event was the publication in 1863–1876 of his lectures on The History of the Jewish Church by A. P. Stanley. This was the first attempt by a British scholar to write a full-scale critical history of Israel. It was dependent upon the work of Ewald, who, as noted above, had produced a more traditional-looking account in comparison with the “negative criticism” of de Wette and Vatke. Stanley wrote circumspectly, with few references to German biblical critics, and drew upon illustrative material from his own extensive travels in Egypt and Palestine. The contradictions in 1 Samuel so shrewdly analyzed by F. Newman were passed over, and the problems raised by the 600,000 males who left Egypt were minimized by the fact that Ewald accepted their accuracy. Stanley’s narrative was not at fundamental variance with that presented in the Old Testament, and if he allowed himself to be “critical,” it was in his view of priesthood and sacrifice. The Israelites had borrowed elements of these from other nations, and although they were imbued with the distinctive spirit of Israelite faith, the Mosaic system needed to be purified by the witness of the prophets. The value of the priesthood lay in its persistence, which enabled the nation to survive the calamity of the exile and ending of the monarchy. The significance of Stanley’s lectures is that they showed that the Bible could be treated “like any other book” without

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

465

the process becoming a danger to faith. In the 1870s, it became possible for the British public to have firsthand access to works of German and Dutch criticism. In 1874 an English translation of Keunen’s The Religion of Israel began to appear (Colenso had already published a translation of Kuenen’s Historisch-kritisch onderzoek in 1865, but Colenso’s notoriety prevented it from receiving any attention), and two years later an English translation of the first volume of Ewald’s History of Israel launched a project to make the whole work eventually available. The initiator and financier of this project was a Leeds Unitarian, Charlotte Lupton, although she did not allow her name to be publicly associated with the venture. These two works, of course, predated the breakthrough classically expressed in Wellhausen’s 1878 History of Israel, but the English-speaking public did not have to wait long before a brilliant presentation of the position, and one probably reached independently of Wellhausen, was published in the form of W. R. Smith’s The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881). The book was based upon public lectures given by Smith while he was on trial for heresy before the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. The charge had been occasioned by articles in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which that by Smith on the Bible had caused particular offense for the way in which it embraced some of the results of German criticism. Smith had studied in Germany in the 1870s, and had been deeply impressed by the way in which pietist circles had developed a positive use of biblical criticism. He was convinced that far from being destructive to faith, biblical criticism was an authentic continuation of what had been begun at the Reformation. It was a means of rescuing the Old Testament from obfuscation and of affirming its message in an age increasingly dominated by scientific discoveries. The Old Testament in the Jewish Church was written with evangelistic fervor and remains one of the best introductory books on biblical criticism. Smith had not embraced criticism without help from his teachers, especially A. B. Davidson, but he was too much in advance of his own church, and was condemned and deprived of his post at the Free Church College in Aberdeen in 1881. He removed to Cambridge, where he concentrated upon Arabian studies. Smith’s conviction that biblical criticism was an aid, not a hindrance, to evangelical belief was take up in England by T. K. Cheyne, but his critical opinions became increasingly extreme, and it was left to S. R. Driver to convinced the academic world of the inescapability of a critical approach to the Old Testament. In 1883 he succeeded E. B. Pusey in the Chair of Hebrew in Oxford, bringing to an end the power that Pusey had wielded in that post since 1828 in fervent opposition to German criticism. Driver’s Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1891) was a painstaking and positive examination of the position advocated by Wellhausen on the Pentateuch, as well as an examination of the critical positions advocated for the other books of the Old Testament. In one respect, the British assimilation of Wellhausen contained an important deviation. Wellhausen (like de Wette) distinguished between the prophetic Hebrew religion of the

466

JOHN W. ROGERSON

pre-exilic period, and the legalistic Judaism of the post-exilic period. The British appropriation, strongly influenced by the neo-Hegelianism that dominated it in the late nineteenth century, preferred to see a development rather than a decline in Old Testament religion. The true heirs of the prophets were held to be the authors of apocalyptic, which in turn served as the background to the ministry of Jesus. Similar, faltering, steps were taken in the United States toward acceptance of critical positions on the Old Testament. C. A. Briggs, for example, who had studied in Berlin under Hengstenberg, became nonetheless sufficiently sympathetic to biblical criticism to be condemned by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1892. He collaborated with Driver in the Anglo-American project of the International Critical Commentary, and with Driver and F. Brown in producing the great Hebrew Lexicon based upon Gesenius. Brown was another pioneer, who had studied in Germany and who stood by Briggs when the latter was on trial. He was later responsible for withdrawing the Union Seminary, where he and Briggs taught, from the Presbyterian Church. The way in which the critical method had been accepted in Britain was demonstrated by the Cambridge Bible Commentary, which, from the 1880s, saw contributions from English and Scottish scholars of a high quality. They included Job by A. B. Davidson (1884), Hosea by Cheyne (1889), Ezekiel (Davidson, 1892), Isaiah 1–39 (J. Skinner, 1896), Joel and Amos (Driver, 1898), Chronicles (W. E. Barnes, 1899), and Nahum, Habbakuk, and Zechariah (Davidson, 1899). British New Testament scholarship in this period lagged far behind what was achieved in the area of the Old Testament. The famous triumvirate of J. B. Lightfoot, B. F. Westcott, and F. J. A. Hort set out to controvert the position advocated by Baur, but got no further than Lightfoot’s work on the Apostolic Fathers, and the critical edition of the Greek New Testament by Westcott and Hart. Westcott’s great commentary on John’s Gospel (1898) argued that the Gospel was composed by John the son of Zebedee, who was an eyewitness of the events he related. The nineteenth century was a time of great change in attitudes toward the study of the Bible, achieved not without a great deal of heart-searching, anxiety, opposition, ecclesiastical condemnation, and mutual distrust. At the end of the century, R. L. Ottley summed up what had happened from a British perspective. It is not impatience, or love of novelty, or self-confidence, or a mere wish to be abreast of recent thought that has led to the changed attitude of younger men; it is the desire to follow humbly and honestly the guidance of the Spirit of Truth.3

Notes 1 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegemona Zur Geschichte Israels, 6th ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1927), 4.

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

467

2 W. G. Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems (London: SCM, 1973), 123. 3 R. L. Ottley, Aspects of the Old Testament (London: Longmans Green, 1897), 43.

Bibliography Brown, C. Jesus in European Protestant Thought 1778–1860. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press. Clements, R. E. A Century of Old Testament Study. Guildford: Lutterworth Press, 1976; rev. ed., 1983. Hayes, J. H. (ed.). Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, 2 vols. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999. Kümmel, W. G. The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems. London: SCM, 1973. McKim, D. K. (ed.). Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2007. Ottley, R. L. Aspects of the Old Testament. London: Longmans, Green, 1897. Reventlow, H. Graf. Epochen der Bibelauslegung. Band IV, Von der Aufklärung bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001. Rogerson, J. W. Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany. London: SPCK, 1984. Rogerson, J. W. The Bible and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F. D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Wellhausen, J. Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 6th ed. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1927.

CHAPTER 23

Liberal Theology in Germany Christine Axt-Piscalar

Preface: Toward the Use of the Term “Liberal Theology” The term “liberal theology” is not a straightforward one, whether it is taken to mean an individual theological position or understood as a particular direction in nineteenth-century German theology. This is due to the fact that in the nineteenth century, “liberal theologians” rarely used the term themselves in any kind of programmatic way, and nor was it much applied to them by others. To take an illustrative example, neither Albrecht Ritschl nor the majority of his students regarded themselves as liberal theologians, even though they are generally considered as such. On the other hand, Martin Rade, editor of the journal Christian World, did actually designate himself and his co-authors as “liberal theologians” from the early twentieth century. However, once again some of these co-authors, such as Adolf von Harnack, did not actually think of themselves as such. If employed at all in the nineteenth century, the term did not so much appear in academic theology as in debates over church policy, where it was usually employed to distinguish “liberal” theology from a strongly church-oriented “positive” theology. Only in the course of the early twentieth century did the term “liberal theology” become more common. In conservative Lutheran circles, particularly amongst the representatives of dialectical theology, it was used polemically to describe their own immediate theological predecessors, as represented by Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, and Martin Rade. But it was also employed more sweepingly to describe the entire nineteenth-century theological program and to disparage it as a falling away from true Christianity and the true theology of the Word of God. Rudolf Bultmann’s dictum is a good example of this kind of blanket criticism: “The subject of theology is God, and the chief charge to be brought against liberal theology is that it has dealt not with God but with man.”1 A proper reading of nineteenth-century liberal theology must consider the extent to which this

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

469

“Theology of the Word” has shaped wider theological opinion on the characteristics of liberal theology. Contemporary study of modern theological history has adopted a dual use of the term. In its narrower sense, “liberal theology” denotes the theology from the last third of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. This usually includes – with appropriate qualifications – Albrecht Ritschl and his school, as headed by Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) and counting among its numbers Julius Kaftan (1848–1926), Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922), Martin Rade (1857–1940), and Ernst Troeltsch (1856–1913), as well as other representatives of the History of Religion School. In its wider sense, “liberal theology” is used as a catch-all term for those ways of thinking which constructively take up Enlightenment principles and try to render them theologically. In this sense the movement began in the eighteenth century, and numbers among its protagonists the neologists and rationalists headed by Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791). Also included in this larger definition is Schleiermacher, particularly the Schleiermacher of On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers,2 as well as the socalled left-wing Hegelians, classically represented by David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) and the Tübingen School, as well as the Swiss theologian Alois Emmanuel Biedermann (1819–1885). And lastly, founded in 1863 and influential in matters of church policy, the German Protestants’ Association gathered together theologians with a liberal outlook, such as Richard Rothe (1799–1867) and Daniel Schenkel (1813–1885).

Motifs of Liberal Theology Individualism Despite the very wide range of writers and concepts which can be subsumed under the category “liberal theology,” it is nevertheless possible to draw out from the history of the term a number of formative characteristics in both content and methodology. However, an outline of liberal theology will not necessarily include all of these characteristics, any one of which might be given a different emphasis. Accordingly, I will bypass liberal Catholicism in Germany, and concentrate on liberal theology in the Protestant tradition. I will proceed from the wider sense of liberal theology as outlined above, emphasizing its core theological assumptions. There will be no detailed discussion of matters concerning church policy, and in particular not of the political demands of liberal theology, which at any rate varied considerably. Politically, representatives of liberal theology called for the selfdetermination of the individual in the form of the liberalization of bourgeois society, and demanded the realization of political freedom. However, in contrast to the United States of America, the idea of individual self-determination only rarely led the representatives of liberal theology in Germany to endorse a pluralistic society, insisting instead upon the importance of the Christian religion and

470

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

church as the unifying foundation of a national state. Their political views were mostly bourgeois, and revolutionary options were championed only to a degree. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Harnack and Rade in particular were occasionally engaging with “the social question,” with Rade advocating democracy as a political form of government, at least to some extent. When it came to church policy, the main opponent of liberal theology was “orthodoxy” as represented by the church authorities, with all its significance for church life and doctrine, the faith of the individual, and the church’s hierarchical structure. By contrast, liberal theology represented a critical view of traditional doctrines and the binding power of the church’s confession, advocating instead a personal religious self-determination. Where the hierarchical structure of both Protestant and Catholic churches made claims not only on the religious life of the individual but also on state and society, liberal theology stood for the idea of a “church from below.” Their concern was to acknowledge a person’s religious independence, and at the same time to recognize the active participation of the individual in the decision-making process of the whole church. Liberal theology sought to take onboard the challenges of the Enlightenment and modernity, and so to transform the content of the Christian religion. Herein lies one of the programmatic characteristics of liberal theology: it seeks to give due consideration to the changing sociological and scientific consciousness of society so that it might demonstrate the continuing validity of the Christian religion. In the course of the early Enlightenment, it became necessary to reformulate the church’s traditional dogma and self-understanding because of the perceived distance between the authoritative claim of church and theology, on the one hand, and science, society, and individual consciousness, on the other. Thereafter, this necessity came to determine the self-perception of liberal theology, which aimed to mediate between faith and reason, theology and science, all the while emphasizing the importance of individual religious experience while being critical of traditional doctrines. Thus liberal theology took up the claim, developed during the course of the Enlightenment, of the individual’s right to autonomy in all areas of life, and enforced this claim with respect to religion. Herein lies the origin of its critical impulse when it comes to doctrines and the church, and the origin too of its attempts to transform Christian doctrines under the changing conditions of modernity.

Historicism Fundamental to liberal theology is the importance of thinking historically. First of all, such historical thinking leads to an understanding of Scripture not as the literal word of God and hence a sacrosanct text, but as a historically conditioned object of study. Scripture’s claim to truth can no longer simply be posited, but has to prove itself in personal religious experience. Johann Salomo Semler pioneered this historical approach in Of the Free Examination of the Canon,3 among other works, and drew conclusions which would be of considerable importance for the

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

471

ensuing era. In this book, Semler analyzes the writings of the biblical canon as a series of historically conditioned texts whose truth he locates in the religious and ethical humanitarian ideal. This humanitarian ideal is characterized by its “beneficial” character. Everyone can know its renewing power for themselves in the religious experience of engaging with the biblical texts. Semler calls this personal religious and moral experience “private religion,” which he distinguishes from “public religion.”4 “Private religion” refers to the religious experience which takes place in the heart of the individual, which the Christian then lives out according to his or her own conscience. Such “private” religion crosses over denominational boundaries: it is present “in the minds of all true Christians of whatever party,”5 and its cultivation to a large degree is independent of doctrines, at least “as they are publicly and unchangingly recited in ecclesiastical language by all members.”6 “Public religion,” then, is that which is practiced in church communities, and valid church doctrines are the necessary means by which these communities regulate their membership and conduct the corporate practice of religion. Importantly, this differentiation of Semler’s between private and public religion was designed to safeguard the right of the individual conscience to determine one’s personal religious experience; it was not specifically intended to challenge the fundamental importance of church doctrines and confessions for formal religion. Nevertheless, it had a lasting effect on the self-perception of liberal theology. The new historical perspective on the Bible brought into play a historical-critical handling of the biblical texts, which, in typical liberal exegesis,7 was swiftly followed up with the dual application of literary criticism and historical-religious contextualization. As a result, even at this early stage, the question arises as to what exactly is “the essence of Christianity” as opposed to the merely contemporary content or form of expression found in the Bible and in church doctrine. Semler approaches this question by distinguishing between the specifically religious and ethical – and hence rational – content of the Christian religion, and the mere historically conditioned “accommodations” made by the authors of the New Testament in their particular historical context, especially with regard to Judaism. According to Semler, the Christian religion is essentially ethico-religious and rational at its heart, on which basis it can claim universal validity; by contrast, he sees the Jewish religion as characterized by its particularism. This question of the “essence” plays a key role, then, in liberal theology in helping it to define Christianity in relation to other religions. Meanwhile, the question also functions within Christianity as a critical standard for differentiating its universally valid “kernel” of truth from that which has only a partial or marginal value.

The essence of Christianity and the history of dogma Schleiermacher likewise demands a definition of the “essence of Christianity”8 or the “idea of Christianity,”9 as he also called it, in order to fulfill the task of theology. This definition functions in the first place as a tool to distinguish the Christian faith from other religions. Taken further, it enables theology to assess

472

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

critically past and present forms of Christianity by holding them up against the “idea of Christianity.” In order to fulfill the task of theology in the present, there is a need to clarify “the relation of any historically given condition of Christianity to the idea of Christianity itself.”10 This task consists in a critical assessment of the present shape of Christianity against the idea of its essence, and also in a present-oriented transformation of Christian doctrine, taking into account changes to the whole cultural situation. This task can only succeed if the essence of Christianity is preserved throughout its translation into the present context. Therefore, when it comes to the definition of the essence of Christianity, Adolf von Harnack distinguishes its “husk” from its “kernel.”11 This “kernel” can be exposed through historical research alone, but even so, its meaning is generally available and can be experienced in the devout contemplation of the person of Jesus. Harnack describes this “kernel” of the Christian religion as follows: In the combination of these ideas – God the Father, Providence, the position of men as God’s children, the infinite value of the human soul – the whole Gospel is expressed.12

The Gospel in this form has the particular power to bridge the “ditch” of history and so to affect the individual directly: “The Gospel in the Gospel,” as Harnack writes, “is something so simple, something that speaks to us with so much power, that it cannot easily be mistaken…. No one who possesses a fresh eye for what is alive, and a true feeling for what is really great, can fail to see it and distinguish it from its contemporary integument.”13 The historical approach to a definition of the essence of Christianity, which is at first defined as a “turning towards the historical Jesus,” later leads to the question of the transition from the historical Jesus and his message to the proclamation of the early Christian community. Taken further, the historical approach raises the issue of the “development of the Ancient Catholic Church,”14 and also of the development of doctrine and its importance for faith and the church. In this way the historical development of Christianity, in particular the history of ideas, becomes the main focus of attention. This in turn results in the development of the history of dogma as a discipline in its own right – a discipline which is, however, understood in different ways by its different representatives. In line with Hegel’s thinking, Baur15 characterizes the development of dogmatic history as a dialectical unfolding of the absolute Spirit (Geist). Meanwhile, Strauss16 and Biedermann17 integrate discussion of the history of dogma into actual Christian doctrine by dealing first of all with biblical doctrine and the development of church dogma, and then attaching to that a speculative philosophical explanation of the true content of the Christian religion. However, Albrecht Ritschl and the theologians influenced by him move away from this speculative view of history toward an approach which is related much more strongly to the historical material. Though slow to develop,

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

473

here at last historicism comes into its own, so much more forcefully than in the speculative variants of dogmatic history. Harnack’s History of Dogma18 is characterized by his understanding of the “simple Gospel of Jesus” and “Jesus’ religion” as the kernel of Christianity: the formation of dogma in the early church he describes – and criticizes – as a “hellenizing” infiltration.19 Above all, Harnack’s criticism of early church dogmas is based on his observation that they do not take adequately into account the humanity of Jesus – a humanity which is given more priority in liberal theology as a whole than it is in “positive” theology. He also criticizes the dogmatic development in the early church in which personal faith is declared to be dependent on the acceptance of right doctrine. According to Harnack, both developments contradict “the experience” which defines the kernel of Christian religion. He disapproves of the over-emphasis on accepting right doctrine for the practice of religion, especially in the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches and in Roman Catholic theology. He also applies this same criticism to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century confessional Lutheranism, the spirit of which he still discerned in his own time. The driving force behind Harnack’s argument is his criticism of traditional doctrine, and criticism also of its perceived importance for faith in the context of personal religious experience. Such criticism is fundamental to liberal theology as a whole. It is worth pointing out that this emphasis on personal religious experience does not mean that nineteenth-century liberal theology rejected church doctrine altogether. The representatives of liberal theology did not understand religious experience as “immediate” in the sense that it has no need of mediation through the context of Christian tradition and way of life; nor did they understand it as an individual experience that resists communality; and nor yet did they advocate a move toward religious pluralism. Most liberal theologians did not dispute the importance of church doctrine for communal forms of religion, as long as these were oriented toward religious experience and moral practice; and moreover, the context of the religious community remains vital for the true mediation of religion. It follows, then, that representatives of liberal theology did not advocate the rejection of all church doctrines, but favored a form that, in keeping with the times, might prove its worth in relation to religious experience and satisfy the principles of reason. They certainly did not view religion as an entirely private affair, but emphasized the fundamental importance of the Protestant Church for cultural unity.

Religious experience However, doctrine has to relate to religious experience, and so it must be comprehensible. This is one of the fundamental demands of liberal theology. Accordingly, liberal theology strives to draw out from religious experience statements about God and the world. No longer should doctrine be understood as

474

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

oriented primarily toward traditional church dogma; rather, liberal theology understands the doctrine of faith (Glaubenslehre) as that form of doctrine which allows religious experience to come into its own. Schleiermacher’s demand that all statements of doctrine be deduced from the religious self-consciousness20 has become programmatic for liberal theology, in the sense that theological doctrine is obliged to prove itself according to religious experience. Ritschl entitled his dogmatics textbook Instruction in the Christian Religion, in which he contends that the particular statements contained therein should be understood as having developed out of the consciousness of the community reconciled with God: Since the Christian religion has its origin in a special revelation, and exists in a special community of believers and worshippers, its peculiar conceptions of God must always be interpreted in connection (a) with the recognition of the one who bears this revelation and (b) with the right appreciation of the Christian community, if the total substance of Christianity is to be understood correctly. A system of doctrine which ignores either of these two elements will prove defective.21

Ritschl rejects alike explanations drawn from the philosophy of religion or from comparative religion. His interest is in the specific features of the Christian religion solely as they find expression in the consciousness of the community as inspired by its founder. However, most representatives of liberal theology do not share Ritschl’s high estimation of community consciousness as the starting point for the “doctrine of faith.” This is because Ritschl’s theology is characterized by a strict adherence to the doctrine of revelation, meaning that on a fundamental level it is biblically grounded and rather more didactic than might be comfortable. As a result, Ritschl’s contemporaries tended to categorize him as a different kind of liberal theologian; Ritschl himself, however, did not wish to be understood as a liberal theologian at all. His own understanding of his theology was that this biblical foundation was grounded in the interconnectedness of the Old and New Testaments. Furthermore, he saw himself as a Lutheran theologian. As a counter to the powerful influence of earlier and contemporary Lutheran orthodoxy, he insisted on putting Luther himself – especially the Luther of the Catechisms – back at the center of Lutheran theology. In this way, Ritschl made a substantial contribution to the “Luther Renaissance” which would also influence Adolf von Harnack, Martin Rade, and later Karl Holl.

God as Father: A personal God In liberal theology, a specific “Dogmatics” usually contains a supplement dealing with the philosophy of religion, in which the importance of religion for the very nature of humanity is highlighted, and Christianity is fenced off from other forms of religion. However, it is a fundamental conviction of liberal

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

475

theology that, since religion is practiced both privately and publicly, it is essential to have such a dogmatic system: Preaching and religious teaching in a community require such a primer, such an introduction to ordered religious thinking, in order to possess a clear direction of thought and a common understanding of fundamental principles.22

Liberal theology is fundamentally interested in Christianity’s power to shape culture. In this respect, faith is not understood purely as a personal relationship with God, but emphasis is placed also on the moral dimension of faith. Liberal theology sets great store by the fact that in religion, the individual is simultaneously placed in a moral relationship to the world, thus highlighting the worldshaping significance of individual faith, of the church, and of Christianity as a whole. In this way, both the individual and the religious community are strengthened by their mutual and active responsibility for bringing about God’s kingdom on earth. This responsibility for shaping the world, as opposed to repudiating it, is one of the fundamental categories by means of which Ritschl, Harnack, Kaftan, and also Troeltsch differentiate Protestant Christianity from those “mystical” forms of religion which turn the person inward and renounce the world. The orientation toward the world is used as a critical yardstick both within Protestantism (as opposed to Catholicism and Greek and Russian Orthodoxy) and with regard to other religions, particularly Eastern ones. Liberal theology shifts the emphasis onto a concept of God that is ethical and personal, and so oriented positively toward the world. Associated with this concept of God is religious experience, which goes hand in hand with the believer’s ethical bias. In the light of this ethical dimension to religion, and considering too the shared responsibility for shaping the world which automatically follows, liberal theology found that the doctrine of sin could be rendered less radically. Instead, Ritschl and Harnack give priority to an understanding of faith as trust in Divine Providence as it is at work in individual lives and in the whole course of history. Thus, central to Harnack’s understanding of religion is belief in Providence, which is founded solely in the relationship with God the Father, as proclaimed by Jesus: The man who can say “My Father” to the Being who rules heaven and earth, is thereby raised above heaven and earth, and himself has a value which is higher than all the fabric of this world.23

Albrecht Ritschl puts it more bluntly: “Faith in the fatherly Providence of God is the Christian world view in an abbreviated form.”24 For Ritschl, belief in Providence forms the religious basis for Christians living in the certainty that they are destined for freedom from the world, and the certainty too that the work they do serves God’s own purpose, since they are actively striving for the Kingdom of God:

476

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

Practical proof of sonship with God in spiritual freedom and dominion over the world and labor for the kingdom of God fill out the Christian life….25

Thus God is imagined as love and wisdom wanting to transform both the individual and the world as a whole into something higher. Both Ritschl and Harnack insist that the Christian concept of God as “Father” is the true understanding of God: The message brought [by Jesus] was of the profoundest and most comprehensive character; it went to the very root of mankind and … addressed itself to the whole of humanity – the message from God the Father.26

Accordingly, discourse about the wrath of God fades into the background, while the idea of the Kingdom of God as an ethical-religious goal becomes the dominant concept. The term “Kingdom of God” does not merely denote inward personal experience (although Wilhelm Herrmann argues that it does), nor is it some abstract, world-negating concept. As Ritschl explains, The concept of God as love corresponds to that idea of mankind which sees man destined for the kingdom of God and for the activity directed toward this kingdom, i.e., the mutual union of man through action springing from love.27

The Kingdom of God, then, signifies the epitome of God’s purpose for the world, in the realization of which the individual and the community are destined to participate.

The power to shape culture With this essential trait of liberal theology, we come close to the reason for its characterization as “cultural Protestantism.” This term, however, was never used as a self-description, and was actually rejected by some, so that it remains rather enigmatic. The power of Christianity to shape culture, as stressed by liberal theology, on no account implies a straightforward identification of Christianity with the self-perception of modern culture. Rather, the intention was that the scientific academic disciplines, which were already differentiating themselves from religion, and also an increasingly secularized social consciousness should be infiltrated anew by the central contents of Christianity. In this way, as Ritschl, Harnack, and Kaftan all agreed, science and society should be referred to theology and religion as the true foundations of culture. The eschatological-apocalyptical basis of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God would later be brought to bear on the contemporary discussion by Johannes Weiss,28 although Weiss himself merely spoke about this proclamation as a mere fact of the history of religion, and did not attempt to render it theologically. It is true that a futurist eschatology and its apocalyptical horizon are very much repressed in liberal theology: a more moderate, present eschatology is much more

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

477

the norm. However, the view that eschatology has not been given any importance in liberal theology has to be revised at least with regard to Julius Kaftan.29 He attributes to eschatology, even in its strongly present form, a constitutive importance for the whole of Christian doctrine and faith. Kaftan regards eschatology as an essential trait in all religion, albeit one which has been brought to perfection in Christianity, given that in religion man is oriented toward an infinite good which he cannot find in worldly possessions. Kaftan explicitly upholds this eschatological viewpoint as a criticism of contemporary society’s immersion in the here and now. Kaftan understands the task of the church in the modern world – a task which is culturally relevant and therefore incontrovertible – as the mediation of the eschatological dimension of religion. This eschatological dimension serves to relativize worldly goods, while at the same time encouraging the individual to continue shaping the world in line with creation. Because of its orientation toward the person and message of Jesus, and because of its historical approach to Christianity as the history of the effect set in motion by its founder, liberal theology takes a fundamental “interest in the historical positivism” of Christianity. This positivism applies every bit as much to the origins of Christianity in the person of Jesus as it does to the history of Christianity’s development: as the founder of the Christian religion and hence the one who started off this whole history, Jesus himself forms the central point of reference. In addition, for liberal theology, this story of Jesus’ impact on the faith of the individual and the church, as well as on Christianity as a cultureshaping force, comes under the history of revelation. However, alongside such positivism, the central content of the Christian religion is asserted as rational and of significance for humanity in general. This is the conclusion when the content of the Christian religion is considered according to its ethical-religious kernel, and where this kernel is formulated as a universally valid humanitarian ideal along Semler’s lines. Alternatively, as outlined by the more speculative branch of liberal theology represented by Strauss and Biedermann, it is appropriate to stress the speculative rational content of the Christian religion as long as Christianity is not also understood as its perfect embodiment. Another option is to understand Christianity as the perfection of all religion – the viewpoint held by Schleiermacher, Harnack, and Kaftan. In this last context, liberal theology may have recourse to a philosophy of religion in order to demonstrate that religion is an anthropological constant. At this point, liberal theology returns to Schleiermacher’s reflections on the theory of religion in order to comprehend the particularity of Christianity against the background of a general concept of religion. This religious-philosophical foundation as it is pursued in liberal theology has above all an apologetic function. Secular society, for all that it increasingly rejects Christianity, should nevertheless be conducted on the basis of religion, given that it is an integral and necessary part of human life. This assertion can be demonstrated “scientifically” by that branch of liberal theology which tries to unpack what is foundational to religion through the application of religious psychology. This “science,” as developed

478

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

by Georg Wobbermin30 and Wilhelm Wundt,31 for example, involves the correlation of the psychology of a nation and the development of the human mind, in order to support the thesis that religion is integral to human nature.

The validity of Christianity Beyond psychology, the History of Religion School demanded a comparative approach to the different religions and a classification of Christianity in the context of religious plurality. Schleiermacher in The Christian Faith decisively encourages this kind of comparative view:32 the History of Religion School owes more to his impetus than to Hegel’s musings on the topic. Proceeding from the “feeling of absolute dependence” that lies at the root of all forms of religion, Schleiermacher grades these various forms into “natural” and “polytheistic” religions before culminating in monotheism, which represents for him the highest level of development in comparison to these other forms. In his view, only monotheism corresponds truly to the understanding of God implied in the “feeling of absolute dependence,” in the sense that in monotheism, “everything finite” is seen as dependent upon “the one Supreme and Infinite Being.”33 Then within the monotheistic religions Schleiermacher differentiates “moral theism,” in which the religious feeling is oriented toward ethical activity in the Kingdom of God, from a somewhat quietist “monism,” in which the religious subject behaves passively toward the world.34 He then claims that moral theism, as the supreme perfection of religious thought, is embodied in Christianity, which was founded by the person and message of Jesus, and continues to work in the contemporary world through faith in him.35 With these reflections, Schleiermacher had laid the foundations for the comparison of religions. With a variety of approaches, the works produced by the History of Religion School continued to explore the issue of the comparison of religions. Troeltsch defines the core concern as follows: [T]he great question of grounding the validity of Christianity within the stream of the universal development of the history of religions and over against the entirely analogous claims to validity made by the other great religions and philosophical world-views or rational-autonomous religions.36

At this point it is important to highlight Troeltsch’s understanding of comparative religion, rejecting as he did Hegel’s speculative approach to religion and religious history, and attending instead to the historical religious material. Ultimately, this leads him to abandon Christianity’s absolute claim to truth.37 But even so, Troeltsch is still able to lay claim to the supreme value of Christianity for European and American culture, given that its emphasis on individualism and the self-determination of the moral person are central to both religious and cultural identity.

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

479

This core emphasis on individualism and self-determination, along with the idea of a personal God, were together understood as the features which most particularly differentiated Christianity from the Eastern religions. When it came to the comparison of religions and cultures, liberal theologians such as Harnack, Troeltsch, and Kaftan upheld Christianity’s personal idea of God and its ethic of religious individuality in the face of the strong bias toward Eastern religions evinced by their educated contemporaries. Moreover, this personal idea of God and the notion of individuality, or, as Harnack put it, the “infinite value of the individual human soul,”38 provides liberal theology with its answer to Darwinism and the formidable rise of the natural sciences toward the end of the nineteenth century. Liberal theology is convinced that Christianity’s defining emphasis on a personal relationship with God means that it actually enhances the peculiar value of personality and the human mind (Geist), both of which were perceived as having been somewhat leveled by the relentless advance of the scientific worldview. Wilhelm Herrmann39 in particular set out to demonstrate that religion is the personal experience which distinguishes humanity, an experience which is not available to scientific examination. In this respect he shares in the fundamental assumptions of Marburg NeoKantianism. Herrmann locates religious experience purely in the realm of personal experience as brought about by the contemplation of the “inner life of Jesus.” This means that the mediating context for religion of church and community recedes completely in importance, in favor of the religious experience which is awakened in the individual by the image of Jesus. Herrmann understands this as an “inbreaking” of eternity into human self-perception, which is experienced as deliverance from the inner conflict in the conscience. (This emphasis on the experience of guilt and sin allows Herrmann to reintegrate into theology a strong sense of the wrath of God.) To the extent that it is related to this conflict in the conscience, redemption holds significance for all humanity. As a consequence, religion is closely related to morality, which itself forms a similar sphere of consciousness and in a similar way likewise evades scientific appropriation.

The uniqueness of Jesus Christ The quest for the “essence of Christianity” led liberal theology to turn toward the historical Jesus, while also combining that emphasis with a critical disassociation from the dogmatic Christ. In other words, not only must the essence of Christianity be measured against the historical Jesus, but so too must the dogmatic Christ correspond to the historical image. The question now revolves around “who Jesus Christ was” and what exactly was “the real purport of his message.”40 Christology is therefore discussed “from below,” proceeding from the image of the historical Jesus as far as it can be ascertained from biblical testimony through historical research:

480

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

In the first place, they [the Gospels] offer us a plain picture of Jesus’ teaching, in regard both to its main features and to its individual application; in the second place, they tell us how his life issued in the service of his vocation; and in the third place, they describe to us the impression which he made upon his disciples, and which they transmitted.41

This so-called Quest of the Historical Jesus,42 as considered and criticized by Albert Schweitzer,43 stands at the furthest extreme of liberal theology’s guiding interest in the humanity of Jesus as opposed to dogmatic Christology. The “Quest’s” main intention was to make statements about Jesus Christ based on Scripture rather than on dogmatics. However, that is not to say that such theologians were interested in a merely “moral” Jesus, and by no means did they regard him as some purely human figure. Rather, they were interested in Jesus’ own religion, by which he is distinguished by his unique relationship to God, and in which resides the power to bring others to faith. In the course of this “Quest,” the doctrine of the two natures of Christ is criticized as it appears in its dogmatic form, as is the doctrine of satisfaction as championed by Anselm; rather, stress is placed on Jesus’ self-sacrifice in the enactment of his obedience to his calling (Ritschl), or, alternatively, in the realization of his consciousness of his sonship (Harnack). Previously, Schleiermacher had declared that to talk about two natures in the one person of Jesus was inherently contradictory, given the problems which arise when applying the term “nature” to God and humanity alike. Moreover, it was unclear to him how two entirely separate natures should be able to form such a unity.44 Thus he transferred the dogmatic version of the two-natures statement into a discussion about the “constant potency of the God-consciousness” in Jesus Christ, which according to Schleiermacher is founded in the particular manner of the “existence of God in Him.”45 However, Ritschl and Harnack in particular tried to reconstruct the doctrine of the two natures, contending that what made Jesus unique and was expressed in his relationship to the Father was precisely his unity with the Father, so that he “himself does God’s work.” As Harnack writes, The consciousness which he possessed of being the Son of God is, therefore, nothing but the practical consequence of knowing God as the Father and as his Father…. However, two observations are to be made: Jesus is convinced that he knows God in a way in which no one ever knew him before, and he knows that it is his vocation to communicate this knowledge of God to others by word and deed – and with it the knowledge that men are God’s children.46

Thus the ontological categories of the classical doctrine of the two natures are transformed into a statement about unity with God in the consciousness and will of Jesus. This unity is accorded a unique quality, on which ground faith in Jesus brings with it the consciousness of redemption, with redemption understood as the knowledge that one is a child of God. In this way, the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth as they are accessible to historical research move to the center

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

481

of Christology: they form its basis, and are upheld as the point of reference for an individual’s religious experience. The depiction of the person of Jesus in liberal theology is often represented as a moral example to be emulated by the individual. However, this understanding is not the predominant one. In the speculative branch of liberal theology of Strauss, for example, the constitutive importance of Jesus’ person gives way to the religious idea which he brought into the world. This religious idea continues to work as a rational idea in the speculative power of the mind (Geist), albeit detached now from his person. However, a significant number of the “classic” liberal theologians locate the uniqueness of his person in the “religion of Jesus,” through which he possesses the divine power to bring the believer into a religious relationship with God: a relationship which was perfectly realized in Jesus and which he now makes available to all. This has greater implications than a mere “Jesuology,” and intends much more than a simple moral example. Whatever it is that constitutes the uniqueness of the person of Jesus – variously described as “the constant potency of the God-consciousness” (Schleiermacher), “Jesus’ consciousness of sonship” (Harnack), or “the inner life of Jesus” (Herrmann) – it can be comprehended only through faith, and only as it is appropriated personally does redemption follow.

The Lasting Influence of Liberal Theology Liberal theology is a theological trend that played an important part in the nineteenth century and up until the beginning of World War I. Its main concern was to assert Christianity’s claim to truth under the conditions of the modern world, and to mediate between Christianity and the contemporary scientific outlook, so that through its basic theological concerns it might outline a truly “modern” theology. In the nineteenth century, it was the confessional theology of the Lutheran Church and other churches which most resisted the influence of liberal theology. Then, due to the outbreak first of World War I, and then of World War II, the course of liberal theology was abruptly curtailed. Nevertheless, it is a fact that all the leading representatives of dialectical theology had studied under the great liberal theologians, every one of whom left their mark. Harnack, Herrmann, and Rade comprised a particular influence on Karl Barth; the theology of Herrmann had a powerful impact on Bultmann’s thinking; and Friedrich Gogarten’s theology owes a special debt to Troeltsch. Despite this, the experience of war led the dialectical theologians to a radical rejection of their theological fathers. They justified this rejection by claiming that a “theology of crisis”47 was obliged to speak of God’s wrath and judgment, of eschatology, of God as the Wholly Other, and of humanity as radically sinful, in a way that was entirely different from what they thought their theological fathers had said and written. And so they proclaimed the hour of repentance, which for them meant the decisive rejection of liberal theology. Owing to the dominance of this

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

482

“Word of God” theology in Germany, it is only recently that a strong interest in liberal theology has once again arisen. Thanks to the publication from 1980 onward of the Complete Critical Edition of Schleiermacher’s works, and from 1998 of the works of Troeltsch, their principal theological concerns have enjoyed a positive reception ever since.

Acknowledgments

Translated by Anette Hagan from the German original and edited by Frances Henderson.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

Rudolf Bultmann, “Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement,” in Rudolf Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1969), 28–52, 29. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Johann Salomo Semler, Von freier Untersuchung des Kanons (Halle, 1771–1775; 2nd exp. ed., Halle, 1776). See Johann Salomo Semler, Letztes Glaubensbekenntnis über natürliche und christliche Religion [The Last Confession of Faith concerning Natural Religion and Christianity] (Königsberg, 1792). Semler Letztes, 64. Ibid., 62. See, for example, that of Julius Wellhausen, David Friedrich Strauss, and Wilhelm Wrede. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline on the Study of Theology (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1966), paras. 21, 24; for Schleiermacher on philosophical theology, see also paras. 32, 39, 40, 44, 49. Schleiermacher, Brief Outline, para. 27. Ibid., para. 34. Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? (London: Williams and Norgate, 1901), 12. Harnack, What Is Christianity? 68. Ibid., 14. Albrecht Ritschl, Die Entstehung der altkatholische Kirche. 2. Auflage [The Development of the Ancient Catholic Church, 2nd ed.] (Bonn, 1857). This is a monograph on the history of church and dogma. With the publication of the second edition (Bonn, 1857), Ritschl escapes most definitively from the influence of the speculative method of Ferdinand Christian Baur, and turns instead to a stronger historical perspective on early church history. Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung [The Christian Doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation in Their Historical Development], especially part 1, “Das Dogma der

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

483

alten Kirche bis zur Synode von Chalcedon” [The Dogma of the Ancient Church up to the Council of Chalcedon] (Tübingen, 1841). See also Ferdinand Christian Baur, Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte [The History of Christian Dogma] (Stuttgart, 1847); and Ferdinand Christian Baur, The Church History of the First Three Centuries (London: Williams and Norgate, 1878–1879; first published in German, 1853). David Friedrich Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und in ihrem Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft [Christian Doctrine in Its Historical Development and Its Conflict with Modern Science], 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1840–1841). Alois Emanuel Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik [Christian Dogmatics], 2nd exp. ed., vol. 2 (Berlin, 1884–1885). Adolf von Harnack, Outlines of the History of Dogma (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893). Compare also the section “The Christian Religion in its Development into Catholicism,” in Harnack, What Is Christianity? 190–217. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1928), para. 15. Albrecht Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 219–292, para. 1. Ernst Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School (1913),” in Ermst Troeltsch, Religion in History (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), 87–108, 100. Harnack, What Is Christianity? 67. Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” para. 51. Ibid., para. 47. Harnack, What Is Christianity? 130. The German of the final phrase, “die Botschaft von Gott als Vater,” might be better translated as “the message of God as Father.” (Ed.) Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” para. 13. Johannes Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reich Gottes [The Proclamation of Jesus on the Kingdom of God], 2nd fully rev. ed. (Göttingen, 1900). Compare Julius Kaftan, The Truth of the Christian Religion (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1894); also Kaftan, Dogmatik, 7th and 8th eds. (Tübingen, 1920); and Kaftan, Neutestamentliche Theologie im Abriss [New Testament Theology in Outline] (Berlin, 1927). For example, see Georg Wobbermin, Christian Belief in God: A German Criticism of German Materialistic Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1918). For example, see Wilhelm Wundt, Ethics: An Investigation of the Facts and Laws of the Moral Life (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1897–1908). See Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, para. 8ff. Ibid., para. 8. Ibid., para. 9. Ibid., para. 11. Ernst Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School,” 90. See Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions (London: SCM Press, 1972). Harnack, What Is Christianity? 63.

484

CHRISTINE AXT-PISCALAR

39 Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communication of the Christian with God: Described on the Basis of Luther’s Statements (London: SCM Press, 1972). 40 Harnack, What Is Christianity? 2. 41 Ibid., 31. 42 The actual German is die Leben-Jesu-Forschung, more accurately translated as “research into the life of Jesus.” The usual English phrase is a rather free – if inspired – paraphrase by Schweitzer’s English publisher. (Ed.) 43 See Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: A. & C. Black, 1910). 44 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, para. 96. 45 Ibid., para. 94. 46 Harnack, What Is Christianity? 128. 47 This phrase was first coined by Karl Barth in his Der Römerbrief (1st ed., 1919; 2nd rev. ed., 1922), available in English as The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1933.)

Bibliography Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Baur, Ferdinand Christian. Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung [The Christian Doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation in Their Historical Development]. Tübingen, 1841. Baur, Ferdinand Christian. Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte [The History of Christian Dogma]. Stuttgart, 1847. Baur, Ferdinand Christian. The Church History of the First Three Centuries. London: Williams and Norgate, 1878–1879. Biedermann, Alois Emanuel. Christliche Dogmatik, 2nd exp. ed. Berlin 1884–1885. Bultmann, Rudolf. Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement [1924], in Rudolf Bultmann, Faith and Understanding 1. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Harnack, Adolf von. Outlines of the History of Dogma. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893. Harnack, Adolf von. What Is Christianity? London: Williams and Norgate, 1901. Herrmann, Wilhelm. The Communication of the Christian with God, Described on the Basis of Luther’s Statements. London: SCM Press, 1972. Kaftan, Julius. The Truth of the Christian Religion. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1894. Kaftan, Julius. Dogmatik, 7th and 8th eds. Tübingen, 1920. Kaftan, Julius. Neutestamentliche Theologie im Abriss [New Testament Theology in Outline]. Berlin, 1927. Ritschl, Albrecht. Die Entstehung der altkatholische Kirche [The Development of the Ancient Catholic Church], 2nd ed. Bonn, 1857. Ritschl, Albrecht. Instruction in the Christian Religion, in Albrecht Ritschl, Three Essays. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972, 219–292. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1928. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Brief Outline on the Study of Theology. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1966. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN GERMANY

485

Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. London: A. & C. Black, 1910. Semler, Johann Salomo. Letztes Glaubensbekenntnis über natürliche und christliche Religion [The Last Confession of Faith concerning Natural Religion and Christianity]. Königsberg, 1792. Strauss, David Friedrich. Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und in ihrem Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft [Christian Doctrine in Its Historical Development and Its Conflict with Modern Science]. Tübingen, 1840–1841. Troeltsch, Ernst. The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions. London: SCM Press, 1972. Troeltsch, Ernst. The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School, in Ernst Troeltsch, Religion in History. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991. Weiss, Johannes. Die Predigt Jesu vom Reich Gottes [The Proclamation of Jesus on the Kingdom of God]. 2nd comp. rev. ed. Göttingen, 1900. Wobbermin, Georg. Christian Belief in God: A German Criticism of German Materialistic Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1918. Wundt, Wilhelm. Ethics: An Investigation of the Facts and Laws of the Moral Life. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1897–1908.

CHAPTER 24

Catholic Modernism Gerard Loughlin

Roman Catholic modernism was of its time. As a movement of thought it bespoke the concerns of nineteenth-century thinkers with the challenge that historical awareness posed to the seeming certainties of the Christian faith. But just insofar as it looked to change Christian thought it bespoke a time to come, a future that had already arrived for some but which needed to arrive more securely and for all. As such it came to haunt twentieth-century Catholicism, both as a path rejected and as a path still to be taken. Catholic modernism shadows Fergus Kerr’s history of Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (2007), which is otherwise structured by the fate of Neo-Scholasticism.1 Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), had encouraged the church to embrace the “solid doctrine of the Fathers and the Scholastics,” and above all the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, as alone best suited for resisting the “machinations and craft of a certain false wisdom,” the “plague of perverse opinions” assailing “domestic and civil society.”2 Scholastic philosophy would teach the meaning of liberty as distinct from license, respect for authority and the “just rule of princes,” and bring “sound judgment and right method” to the arts, and “force and light” to the “physical sciences.”3 And when Pope Pius X came to condemn the teachings of the modernists, in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), he opposed them to the teachings of Scholasticism, dislike for which is the sure sign of a modernist.4 Neo-Scholastic philosophy, as taught in the seminaries of the Catholic Church, was the one reliable bulwark against the falsehoods of modernity. Fergus Kerr’s twentieth-century story narrates the collapse of that defense, perhaps from the encroachments of modernity, but also from the retrieval of an earlier Scholasticism, a rereading of Thomas that pitched him against the philosophical system propounded in his name. But our concern is with the modernism to which Pius X opposed his understanding of the Angelic Doctor.5 For it is one of many ironies that those condemned as modernists could see themselves as faithful Thomists.

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

487

Indeed, George Tyrrell – who was one of the most prominent modernists in his day – could write that when he taught at St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst (1894– 1896), he was perceived as “favouring the Pope’s ultra-Thomism.” But his partiality was subversive. “If the Dominicans knew what my Thomism meant, they would burn me at a slow fire.” Tyrrell would study Thomas as he would study Dante, “in order that knowing the mind of another age we might know the mind of our own more intelligently.” His hope was to “use the neoscholastic movement to defeat the narrow spirit which animates many of its promoters,” to introduce what might otherwise seem “alien” thought “under cover of Aquinas.”6 The story of modernism is not exactly that of two rival Thomisms, though it is that: on the one hand, a finely honed system that sought to establish the rationality of theism, Christianity, and finally Catholicism and the authority of the pope, who had become infallible in 1870; and, on the other hand, a spirituality that was above all impressed with the unknowability of that which it yet named God, the source and goal of all life, and who in Jesus had come to us so that we might reach our goal, in the company of the saints. But it is also the story of when modernity arrived in the Church, perhaps not for the first time, nor the last, but a time when a number of talented Catholics sought to understand their faith in such a way that they could find eternity in an otherwise disenchanted world, a history and nature that had come to seem radically contingent yet comprehensible – and controllable – through sciences that had no need of divinity. It was the arrival of the world in which many of us still live.

Making Modernism It is often said that Catholic modernism is the construct of those who opposed it, brought into being by its avowed enemies. Modernism is the child of Pascendi, a phantom of papal rhetoric.7 Issued on September 8, 1907, this encyclical was a robust and lengthy condemnation of modernism. Addressed to the bishops of the Catholic Church by Pius X, its greater part was probably penned by Fr. Joseph Lemius (1860–1923), a curial theologian with a passion for distilling and destroying the modernist system.8 The pope, however, set the tone. Scathing in its denunciations, and sarcastic in its descriptions, Pascendi often descends to insult and the use, as it itself admits, of uncouth or “unwonted terms.”9 Modernism is a perversion of the mind that springs from curiosity, pride, and ignorance, but chiefly pride.10 It is to be defeated by rooting out all infected parties from seminaries and Catholic universities, where many have created “chairs of pestilence,”11 and through careful censorship and the setting up of “councils of vigilance” in all dioceses.12 But the most effective remedy was prescribed after Pascendi, on September 1, 1910, in the form of an anti-modernist oath to be taken by all priests and anyone else who might be enjoined to do so.13 No modernists are named in Pascendi, and none of their texts cited. But earlier, on July 17, 1907, the Holy Office had issued a decree, Lamentabili sane, that listed

488

GERARD LOUGHLIN

and condemned a number of propositions taken from unnamed modernist writings. But no one person propounded the views ascribed to modernism as a whole; indeed, that there was a movement at all is something like wishful or fearful thinking. It was as if the defenders of Scholasticism needed to imagine themselves opposed by a system every bit as comprehensive as their own – by, in fact, the “synthesis of all heresies.”14 Only something this grand could justify the ferocity of attack and severity of defense. Indeed, Alfred Loisy – the leading French modernist – was to make very much this argument in his Simples réflexions (1908).15 And Pascendi admits that the system it attacks has had to be constructed, since “it is one of the cleverest devices of the modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast.”16 The infection that Pascendi seeks to overcome, the enemy it wants to rout, has a “manifold personality; he is a philosopher, a believer, a theologian, an historian, a critic, an apologist, a reformer.”17 But first and last, he is a philosopher. He is agnostic about the human capacity to know God, yet also discerns a “vital immanence.” God is found within the subconscious, though obscurely.18 But this sense is the basis of religion, indiscriminately considered: “that most absurd tenet of the Modernists, that every religion, according to the different aspect under which it is viewed, must be considered as both natural and supernatural.”19 The unknown is given in the known, so transfiguring the latter. But this is also a disfiguring, because faith is needed to see what is otherwise not evident, and this is particularly so of Christ.20 And then the intellect steps in, transforming the sense of the divine into symbols and dogmas, which are thus secondary, not primary. They are mere instruments, and given to evolving, to changing with the times.21 Pascendi then shows how these ideas are worked out in the other aspects of the modernist “personality,” as believer, etc. The encyclical is most incensed by the appeal to experience as the basis of religion, when the latter should be understood as a matter of recognition and deduction from given facts. It is affronted by the secondariness of theological judgment and church pronouncement, and the supposed “evolution” of the latter. On the contrary, what was once given is good for all time.22 Finally, Pascendi finds modernist immanentism to be no more than pantheism, and indicates the road that leads from Protestantism via modernism to atheism.23 Pascendi is never less than vigorous, and it is almost plausible in the system it sketches. Knowing the work of the modernists, one can see the tendencies it has crystallized, which contain lines of thought that stretch far into twentiethcentury theology, Catholic and Protestant. But knowing the modernists a little better, one also realizes how wide of the mark it is, as well as constantly wondering why it finds the problems it does. But above all, one realizes that it is never less than a diatribe, that it lacks any sense of the problems with which its opponents are struggling, and that they are genuine problems requiring real struggle.

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

489

Pascendi is devastating, but it is not serious. It is the work of men who have ceased to think, let alone be puzzled by the mystery of the world. But it is the anti-modernist oath that perhaps gives the clearest indication of what really concerned Pius and his collaborators, a concern they could not otherwise articulate. The oath makes five chief professions, of which the fifth is that “faith is not a blind feeling of religion welling up from the recesses of the subconscious,” but an assent of the intellect to proffered truths.24 But from where do such truths come, and how are they known to be true? The first profession is that God is known by reason through his effects; the second, that Christianity is proved from such as “miracles and prophecies”; and third, that the Church “was immediately and directly instituted by the real and historical Christ”; and the fourth, that its teaching is given always “the same meaning and interpretation.”25 Here reason has the first place, and it leads from God to the papacy, the teaching of which is invariant and beyond question, except that modernism did question. The papal, Neo-Scholastic argument, as set out in the oath, is more than weak, and the pointing out of this a cause for almost limitless anxiety. Modernism was well established by the time it was condemned, with a number of proponents, clerical and lay, throughout Europe and in the United States of America.26 But it was not a movement that anyone sat down to invent. Its agenda was emergent rather than drawn up, evolving rather than planned, responding to events rather than instigating them, and non-simultaneous. It was not everywhere the same at the same time, and all involved – some of whom were selfproclaimed modernists, while others had the name thrust upon them – grew, fluctuated, and even declined in the nature and intensity of their modernity. For many it was but a further development of what was recognized as liberal Catholicism, a movement of thought and sensibility that sought to reconcile Catholicism with the modern sciences of history and nature, and with democracy. The last point should not be overlooked. All the modernists were at home in political cultures that to one degree or another had enfranchised their (male) citizens and relativized the power of the Church. They looked for the same freedom of thought, of conscience and expression in the Church as they enjoyed in civil society. But Rome was still at odds with the political order that, in the wake of Napoleon, had emerged in the nineteenth century with France’s Third Republic (beginning in 1871), and with – above all – the final loss of the Papal State in 1870.27 These developments were not other than traumatic for the papacy, with the most hysterical reaction being Pius IX’s orchestration of “his own infallibility.”28 But while this last produced much agonizing in the Church, it fooled no one, and the Church’s loss of power continued apace, even as its claims to authority grew more strident. Thus modernism – and its destruction – became almost inevitable, since its overcoming reaffirmed the identity of a Church that was now dependent on just such defeats. But the modernists themselves sought a different identity for the Church, believing that it had to change with the times in order to remain the same: the bearer and sustainer of a spiritual truth that exceeded the form in which it

490

GERARD LOUGHLIN

arrived and was nurtured. Thus the modernists contended with developments in the historical criticism of the Bible, advanced alternative philosophical frameworks to what they saw as a moribund Scholasticism, and argued for a spirituality that while most truly named as Catholicism – in its doctrines of the Trinity and Christ – was yet more universal in its effects than the reach of the Church. The underlying attitude of this approach was well summed up by Wilfred Ward when he wrote of it as an attempt to “present Catholic doctrine in such a form as to make it clearly consistent with the scientific researches of the day, and to attract the deeper religious thinkers … who are looking for truth and would not see it in ancient forms of thought and expression quite incomprehensible to them.” I considered this endeavour to be exactly that of St Thomas in the 13th century, when, though censured by many for the novelty of his method, he translated Catholic theology into the dialectical form which the intellectual habit of the day demanded, and assimilated it to the philosophy of Aristotle which, though the Fathers had denounced it, had gained such a hold on the western intellect in the 13th century.29

Ward was writing at the end of 1909, but describing what he had believed fifteen years previously, when he had first become acquainted with a nascent modernism, and with the work of George Tyrrell in particular. In the intervening years, however, the modernists had gained their name, and moved away from what Ward recognized as his own liberal Catholicism. Modernism had become the name of those who, starting out with the best of intentions, had come to privilege their own judgment above that of the Church’s due authorities, and so had become un-Catholic. If Ward had ever thought himself a modernist, he would not have done so after 1907 and the moment of crisis. One might think of him as modernist-lite.30 Loisy, five of whose books had been placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1903, was excommunicated in 1908. He did not seek reconciliation. But George Tyrrell’s break with the Church was the most tragic. He had converted to Catholicism in 1879, and become a Jesuit priest in 1891; fourteen years later, in February 1905, he was expelled from the Order. In 1907 he published two articles against Pascendi and was excommunicated. And two years after that, on July 15, 1909, he died from Bright’s disease.31 Having been unable to recant his views, he was denied a Catholic burial, and the priest – Tyrrell’s old friend, Henri Bremond – who presumed to say prayers at the graveside, was reprimanded and later required to take the oath against modernism.32 (For some, sacraments and rites become political, not the means of God’s grace but the measure of men’s displeasure.) But other modernists escaped discipline. Friedrich von Hügel – the modernists’ éminence grise – always wrote more cautiously than those whom he tutored in thinking differently, and he was a layman.33 Yet others – for example, Edouard Le Roy and Lucien Laberthonnière (a priest) – had books placed on the Index, but were not otherwise punished.

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

491

And Maude Petre (1863–1942), who loved Tyrrell and fostered his life and writings, and wrote his biography, was for a time denied the sacraments in her own diocese, but received them elsewhere. But of more concern than the fate of individuals was the state of paranoia that gripped the Church, as if it had become a police state in which the wrong thoughts, unwisely or foolishly spoken, would lead to delation, condemnation, and expulsion.34 Maisie Ward complained that Maude Petre’s writings on modernism were melancholic, “instinct with sorrow”;35 but then Tyrrell’s death almost slips out of sight in Ward’s account. The story of modernism is a sad one. Maisie Ward was the doting eldest daughter of Wilfred Ward (1856–1916), and he and his wife Josephine (née Hope-Scott, 1864–1932) were at the heart of upperclass English Catholic life and culture. Having given up thoughts of opera, Wilfred’s career was that of a gentleman “liaison officer” between Catholicism and wider society.36 More substantially, he was a biographer of Catholic lives, most notably of his own father, William George Ward – a Newmanite who with his wife converted to Catholicism in 1845, the first of the Tractarians to do so – then of Cardinal Wiseman, and finally of Cardinal Newman.37 In 1906 Wilfred took over the editorship of The Dublin Review, which had previously been edited by his father.38 Josephine Ward was the second of three daughters (“bad, worser and worst”)39 born to James Hope-Scott and his second wife, Victoria Howard. James was a Scott through his first marriage to the granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott, from whom he also took the Scott family home of Abbotsford, where Josephine spent the first years of her life. James’ second wife, and Josephine’s mother, was the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. Thus Wilfred, a second-generation Catholic, married into one of the country’s most illustrious recusant families. While Wilfred was a biographer and journalist, his wife was a novelist – writing as Mrs. Wilfred Ward.40 The author of some thirteen books, she told the story of modernism in her novel Out of Due Time (1906).

The Story of Modernism Mrs. Ward’s novel is not often mentioned in discussions of modernism. Alec Vidler referred to it in his study of A Variety of Catholic Modernists (1970), but in such a way as to suggest that it had not been read.41 But for modernism, the roman à clef was a natural form. All the modernists were prolific writers, producing books and articles, signed and anonymous, and commenting on them – their own and others – in copious letters and missives, and so constructing and reconstructing the story in which they were all players.42 It is certainly the case that Out of Due Time is the way in which Mrs. Ward entered into the story in which her husband was an important, though not a leading, character. But it is not possible to distinguish her position from his, nor theirs from that of their daughter, Maisie, who got to tell the final version of the tale.43 The novel enabled the Wards to say in public what otherwise was only privately available.

492

GERARD LOUGHLIN

Out of Due Time is the story of a small group of Catholic friends, who, enthused with the latest results of biblical criticism, set out to inform and reform the Church, and, meeting resistance, work to convert Rome so that all will be converted. Theirs is a passion for the faith and for learning. Early readers knew that the novel was about the modernists, though Mrs. Ward would only admit to it being based on the story of the priest Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854), the founder of French liberal Catholicism.44 Lamennais both defended the Catholic faith – arguing for it on the basis of the sensus communis, the necessity and rationality of believing in what is commonly known – and democracy. Through the newspaper L’Avenir (The Future), he argued for such policies as the separation of church and state, and the legitimacy of civil rights, such as freedom of the press. The paper’s motto was “God and Liberty.” Condemned by the French episcopacy, who prohibited sales of the paper, Lamennais and his friends – Henri-Dominique Lacordaire and Charles de Montalembert – appealed to Rome, where they arrived in December 1831 after a month’s journey. They were granted an audience with Pope Gregory XVI in March of the following year, but to little effect.45 In July Lamennais left Rome for Munich, where he received a copy of the encyclical Mirari vos (August 15, 1832), which ruled out the Church’s embrace of liberty, condemning freedom of conscience and of the press. There was to be no separation of church and state, no equality of religions under the state – the power of which did not come from the people. As a result, though not immediately, Lamennais was to abandon Catholicism, and eventually died without the comforts of the church in 1854.46 He was buried without religious ceremony in Père Lachaise in Paris. In 1864 his Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817– 1823) was listed in Pius IX’s syllabus errorum, and it was formally condemned at the Vatican Council in 1870. Mrs. Wilfred Ward’s novel tells a similar tale. Her Lamennais also combines liberal views with papal commitment. When his publication, The Catholic International Review,47 is threatened with closure he too travels with friends to Rome and is kept waiting for an inconclusive audience with the pope, only to learn later that his ideas have been condemned. Disillusioned, he leaves the Church. But Mrs. Ward’s Lamennais is more concerned with reconciling exegetical and theological matters than political and civil ones, and her hero or antihero is Count Paul d’Etranges. Though Mrs. Ward denied that he was based on Baron von Hügel,48 the identification seems obvious. Most readers assumed parallels between her characters and her and her husband’s friends and acquaintances. “How incredibly remote these unhappy things now seem,” Fr. C. C. Martindale wrote to her twenty years after the novel’s publication. “And how quite possibly the very dear and venerated Baron [von Hügel] did just spoil his possibly vast career by a few flaws somewhere or other in his make-up – of course, I am not taking d’E[tranges] as a full portrait; but it has made me re-reflect upon my memories of him.”49 The story of the liberal Catholic turned modernist Paul d’Etranges is told from the point of view of a steadfast liberal, Lisa Fairfax, who is in fact Mrs. Ward

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

493

herself. Indeed, the young Lisa expresses something of Josephine’s own pre-marital trepidations;50 but then Lisa meets George Sutcliffe, the author of articles in The Nineteenth Century, with whom she slowly falls in love and eventually marries. George is Wilfred. But before Lisa realizes where her true affections and intellectual sympathies lie, she fancies that she and the Count should be united in matrimony as well as in “the cause” – which is best explained to her and the reader by Sutcliffe. It is, as far as I can make out, the reform of the intellectual condition of the Church Catholic and Universal. I smell something of Christian Socialism in the business, which is not much in my line, but it is what attracts his sister. He [d’Etranges] regards Catholicism as the one hope for religion and order in the future – as the one effective defence against infidelity and anarchism. But the Church cannot triumph unless it assimilates modern science, and keeps its hold on the people. It must be scientific and democratic. One of the first articles of the Count’s creed is death to Scholasticism, and there I’m partly with him. He is to bring the seminaries up to date in historical criticism, and there I say “chi va piano, va sano” [he who goes softly, goes safely], for after all it is a science in its infancy…. He knows so little of human nature; he has no philosophy of action, he leaves everything to ideas. Teach the young priests philosophy up to date, shake the Vatican like a bottle of medicine till you get the right things at the top, and you will have a Catholic church made in Germany, and fit, according to him, to guide and to embody the thought of the human race.51

The Count, like the Baron, carries on an “immense correspondence” with people on the Continent.52 And like the Baron – or so the Wards believed – d’Etranges has no doubt as to the rightness of the cause and will use any means to further his ends. As Sutcliffe remarks with disgust, the Count employs “unprincipled journalists” and “will hobnob with intriguers,” one of whom is “a seedy American who lives in Rome to make mischief or money, and the other is the journalist who publishes the same mischief to enlighten the British public.”53 The Baron did encourage non-Catholics to write to the press and publish articles criticizing the Church when he felt that it was not safe for him or other Catholics to do so. He would often dictate the pieces that appeared under the names of others.54 Lisa is drawn to the Count through copying out articles for him. In this way she learns his theology, and learns finally that she herself is not heterodox and doesn’t love him after all. Her future is with Sutcliffe and moderation. They are Catholics at the end of the day, while the Count, by the end of the novel, has moved beyond Catholicism – and here he is perhaps more Lamennais than von Hügel – which is but the expression of the universal religion, given in humanity.55 The Catholic Church “gathers and preserves … the imperishable fragments of holiness in human history.”56 While the men are writing theology, Lisa plays her part by writing fiction, as Josephine writes Out of Due Time. The latter is Lisa’s book. The novel suggests that the modernist flaw was one of intellectual arrogance. Its proponents were overly

494

GERARD LOUGHLIN

intellectual, and overly convinced of their righteousness. This drove them to the edge and beyond. It is said of the Count that he does not have “the religion that men should die in, the religion of the heart.”57 He is too intemperate and cannot wait upon the times. He acts too soon. But those who can wait – and Rome can wait – may yet see realized what at present seems impossible. As many have thought, the modernists had only to wait for the second Vatican Council (1962– 1965), though for some the latter also arrived too soon. At the end of Ward’s novel, after the cause has failed, and Sutcliffe and d’Etranges have gone their separate ways, the time moves forward fifteen years, and George and Lisa return to Rome, where they find – much to their and the reader’s surprise – that the Count has returned to the Church and become a Dominican. He is preaching in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and he appends a concluding statement to the novel, in which he aptly quotes from Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. There is a time for everything, and many a man desires a reformation of an abuse, or the fuller developments of a doctrine, or the adoption of a particular policy, but forgets to ask himself whether the right time for it has come; and, knowing that there is no one who will be doing anything towards its accomplishment in his own lifetime unless he does it himself, he will not listen to the voice of authority, and he spoils a good work in his own century, in order that an other man, as yet unborn, may not have the opportunity of bringing it happily to perfection in the next…. And all those who take the part of that ruling authority will be considered as time-servers or indifferent to the cause of uprightness and truth; while, on the other hand, the said authority may be accidentally supported by a violent ultra party which exalts opinions into dogmas, and has it principally at heart to destroy every school of thought but its own.58

History Count Paul d’Etranges comes to grief through espousing the “higher criticism,” through finding the Bible erroneous (in parts) and saying this. The nineteenth century saw the development of historical science, of an approach to the past that judged its remains – artifacts and chronicles – by standards of reason that were newly confident of the world’s lawful working, and in the progress of human endeavor and understanding. This approach to the past was not new in the nineteenth century. It was the gift of the Enlightenment, with David Hume its most devastating exponent.59 But the nineteenth century saw its ever more exact development: an exquisite refinement of tools for the sifting of fact from fantasy, of the likely from the legendary, the credible from the unacceptable. This was especially an achievement of biblical historiography, first in England and then in Germany, and then in England again, as elsewhere on the Continent.60 As such, this was very much a story of Protestant engagement, but toward the end of the nineteenth century it became a Catholic one also, and the modernists

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

495

were very much involved in bringing these concerns home to the Catholic Church, with reaching an accommodation between faith and the questioning of its once seemingly impregnable support: a self-evidently veridical scripture. The most distinguished writer in this regard was Alfred Loisy (1857–1940). Loisy was exemplary in the clarity with which he argued for the separation of history from theology. The first is considered apart from faith, by an impartial reason that answers only to the way the world is seen to go and verified as going. There was the historical sense of the texts and their traditional one; the first appertaining to them in virtue of their origin and true nature, the second that which has been grafted on to them by the work of faith in the later evolution of Judaism and Christianity. For the critical historian only the first is to be considered as the meaning of the biblical text; the second regards the history of exegesis and belief.61

At the time, the challenge posed by this separation of a primary historical sense from a secondary theological interpretation was focused in the question of inspiration, made unavoidable for Catholic thinkers by the encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893). This asserted the divine authorship of Holy Scripture, which is inspired in all its parts and thus free from error.62 Moreover, this teaching was expressly aimed against practitioners of the “higher criticism,”63 though at the same time the encyclical called for the support of such scholarship as would serve to show to show that the “errors” were apparent only.64 The encyclical could thus be read as either defending the inerrancy of Scripture in all its parts or the need for Scripture’s careful interpretation so as to preserve its inspired status. Thus the letter itself became the site of contested interpretations, arguing for and against the freedom for historical criticism in the Catholic Church.65 Loisy wrote on many topics, but he began as a biblical scholar, his first book on the Old Testament appearing in 1890, with a second on the New Testament in 1891. Two more quickly followed in 1893 and 1894. But the book that brought him most attention was L’Évangile et l’Église (1902), the “classical exposition of Catholic Modernism,” as Tyrrell was to state.66 The book was presented as a Catholic response to Adolf von Harnack’s recently published and widely read Das Wesen des Christentums (1900), a book that would become a classic statement of Liberal Protestantism: Jesus came to proclaim the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, the arrival of the kingdom in the heart of the individual.67 This, for Harnack, was the historical kernel of the Christian faith, and all else was husk, to be discarded. Against this, Loisy insisted on the necessity of tradition, as that which carried and so constituted the story of Jesus. However the truth of Christianity may be summed, it will be found in the whole rather than in one part; it will be found in the faith of those who responded, rather than in the facts descried by the historian. Faith responds to the coming of Christ and his church, the history in which faith lives and flourishes. Dogma is not given entire at the first, but grows and develops in order that the truth of Jesus may arrive in the changing contexts that history brings. Here Loisy, like other

496

GERARD LOUGHLIN

modernists, could look back to John Henry Newman and his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845, 1878) as having opened the way to what the modernists were now attempting, though with a greater sense of the gap between the scriptural testimony and its doctrinal development than Newman could have envisaged.68 The Cardinal had enthused many of the modernists, and his prestige was such that they were only too happy to claim lineage, though others – such as Wilfred Ward – feared that Newman’s name would be tarnished by its association with them, that Newman’s idea of development would be thought condemned by Pascendi, as indeed Tyrrell was to argue.69 While L’Évangile et l’Église was welcomed by many, including a cautious Cardinal Sarto, who later became Pope Pius X,70 others perceived that though it attacked Harnack, it defended his historicism. For Loisy there was no abiding core to Christianity that somehow escaped the vicissitudes of history. There was but the history of the church’s survival, a continuing but changing form of faith. Cardinal Richard of Paris condemned the book in January 1903, and in the autumn of that year Loisy published an Autour d’un petit livre in which he sought to clarify his thought. But rather than conciliate, it exacerbated by even more clearly insisting on the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Jesus had no consciousness of being what later faith recognized, and that recognition was revelation. “La révélation se réalise dans l’homme, mais elle est l’oeuvre de Dieu en lui, avec lui et par lui.”71 And likewise, the founding of the church and her sacraments was a matter of faith rather than history. These views may now seem uncontroversial, so commonplace did they become in the twentieth century, but in Loisy’s day they were seen as an attack on the authority of the church, which claimed a self-evident foundation, secure from the vagaries of belief. By the end of 1903, with Pius X having succeeded Leo XIII, five of Loisy’s books were placed on the index of prohibited books. While Loisy submitted to this judgment, he could not recant his views. He gave up his lectureship at the École des Hautes Études, and devoted himself to further historical work on the Gospels. In 1908 he was formally excommunicated, and in 1909 he became a professor at the Collège de France. In Loisy, modernism had its sharpest exponent of the historical criticism that had already challenged Protestant faith in the nineteenth century, and would challenge Catholic belief in the twentieth. The issues would be constantly revisited in the Protestant traditions throughout the twentieth century, and increasingly encountered in Catholicism after the second Vatican Council. It was the Church’s response to such as Loisy that delayed the Catholic encounter with the challenges of history. There would be repeated attempts to close the gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and to find the former but the projection of a secular belief.72 But such attempts, despite their legitimacy and success, cannot overcome the historicizing of knowledge that the nineteenth century brought, and modernism focused. George Tyrrell’s now famous remark, “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well,”73

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

497

articulates the relativity that affects both the positivists, who would evade contingency, and their opponents, who seek to triumph through its acknowledgment.74

Philosophy Modernism was very much concerned with persuading the Catholic Church that it needed to acknowledge and accommodate the disquietude that a historical sensibility brings to knowledge.75 Texts have to be interpreted, and are interpreted in the very act of reading. And the texts interpreted are themselves interpretations, ventures upon realities that are only brought to light in the venturing. Facts are found through fiction, through the inventing that is their discovery. Put another way, the modernist challenge was for faith to be faith. Faith gives rise to facts, not facts to faith. The Church had to take responsibility for its reading of Scripture. Likewise, it had to take responsibility for its reading of nature, and its fashioning of reason. Neo-Scholasticism, however, sought to evade faith by establishing it upon certain knowledge, given in Scripture and nature through reason. It was possible to establish the existence of God through reason, and from there build arguments for the veracity of scripture and the authority of the church. Pascendi, as we have seen, ridiculed what it saw as the modernist attempt to found religion on an appeal to experience, to the idea that a sense of the supernatural is given in the natural. It criticized this as subjective, equating revelation with consciousness (or subconsciousness), and as pantheistic, equating the world with God. But those whose teaching might have been read in this way took great care to stress the interrelationship between what is seen and the one who sees – so that knowledge emerges from the movement between the two – and even more care to establish that what is immanent in nature is that which transcends it, and immanent because it is transcendent. This more philosophical modernism is normally found in the writings of Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), Lucien Laberthonnière (1860–1932), and Edouard Le Roy (1870–1954).76 Blondel is the most important of these, but his inclusion among the modernists is sometimes questioned.77 Having avoided censure, later writers would claim him as a source for orthodox ressourcement, and, as with Newman, seek to deny any taint of heterodoxy; while others saw him and Newman as forebears of their own revisionism. And others simply failed to see the requisite modernity in his writings. Blondel, according to Robert Dell, had a “regular ecclesiastical mind,”78 and not only did he escape censure, but also he willingly submitted to papal authority and only privately lamented what befell others. “If he had been a modernist, he would have been an agonizing, but not a courageous one.”79 Blondel criticized Loisy, occasioning a rebuke from von Hügel.80 But like Loisy, Blondel’s own immanentist philosophy was set against what he saw as the “extrinsicism” of the Neo-Scholastics, that argued from facts – whether of

498

GERARD LOUGHLIN

nature or scripture – extracted from their contexts, attending to their extrinsic or imbued character, rather than to their intrinsic meaning.81 But he also opposed what he named “historicism,” an appeal to history that hid the interpretive lenses by which that history was brought into view, and that set a gulf between fact and interpretation, ignoring the dependency of the former on the latter.82 Against both, Blondel set an account of “tradition” as the happy synthesis of history and dogma. Tradition is not a mere matter of transmitting the past to the present, or of reading the present into the past, but of discovering and formulating “truths on which the past lived, though unable as yet to evaluate or define them explicitly,” and so enriching “our intellectual patrimony by putting the total deposit little by little into currency and making it bear fruit.”83 This was Blondel’s own account of doctrinal development, and might well have been censured, but was not. Equally suspect might have been Blondel’s chief work, L’Action (1893),84 in which he sought to show that faith was a possibility already given in human experience. This was not an appeal to particular experiences, religious or otherwise, but to that which is common in all experience: a longing for something “uniquely necessary” but seemingly unobtainable. In every act we strive for something more than what we seek, something that transcends the act and its goal. This comes to view through reflection on action, the latter giving rise to thought and thought to the former’s truth. And the truth, as articulated by Blondel, is the appearing of the beyond in the midst, the supernatural in the natural – of an infinite that shadows our finitude. This view, as Henri de Lubac was later to point out, might be thought to derive from Thomas Aquinas,85 from the Neo-Platonic idea of a desire that moves us to return from whence we came.86 It also looks forward to a sustained development in the work of Karl Rahner,87 but also – in its day – to that “folly” of “vital immanence” denounced in Pascendi, of a “subconscious” need for God,88 “a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the reality of God, and infuses such a persuasion of God’s existence and His action both within and without man as far to exceed any scientific conviction.”89 Blondel did well not to be thought one of the modernists or “pseudo-Mystics” by those on the hunt.

Mysticism It is perhaps because the modernists became figures of fear for some and of hope for others – the threat or promise of church and world reconciled – that the intentionality of their inner life has been often questioned. Calling for a changed Catholicism, their faith and honesty had to be either impugned or upheld. Alfred Loisy, who from 1904 onward expected to be excommunicated, and did nothing to resist it when it was finally proclaimed in 1908, has often been interrogated to determine just when and in what manner he ceased to believe.90 George Tyrrell’s faith was suspect from the moment of his excommunication in October 1907,

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

499

and his refusal to recant the articles that had earned such displeasure. Tyrrell could write of his old friend, Friedrich von Hügel, that he held nothing true, “but the sum total of nothings is sublime!” Christ was not merely ignorant but a téte brulé [sic]; Mary was not merely not a virgin, but an unbeliever and a rather unnatural mother; the Eucharist was a Pauline invention – yet he makes his daily visit to the Blessed Sacrament and for all I know tells his beads devoutly.91

Though a private, hyperbolic remark, this captures the mixture of skepticism and piety that both attracts and appalls in the modernists. For some it bespeaks their duplicity, while for others their insight into the core of Christianity, and the obstacles to saying it in a church so fearful of dissent and fracture – or so wise in rooting out the heretic, as others might think. Tyrrell and von Hügel first met in October 1897,92 and though it was the view of the Wards – Wilfred, Josephine, and Maisie93 – and of Maude Petre94 that von Hügel had endangered Tyrrell’s faith and mind with tales of historical criticism, what von Hügel valued in Tyrrell was his spiritual discernment or mysticism.95 In 1899, von Hügel expressed the view that Tyrrell was the English-speaking friend with whom he was “most completely at one.” I have, of course, other gratefully cared for friends amongst them, but they are either not intellectually alive, or active largely on other subjects or in other directions, – at least more so than you are. The mystical attrait is a point that really speaks volumes, all round.96

Some fifteen years after Tyrrell’s death, and despite the distance that had grown between them, von Hügel acknowledged the “force and completeness of that born mystic” who had so generously, and “for so many years,” helped him in the writing of The Mystical Element of Religion (1908), “especially as to the mystical states, as to Aquinas and as to the form of the whole book.”97 Both writers shared a common commitment to historical science, with Tyrrell supposedly inducted into its methods by von Hügel – and if von Hügel schooled Tyrrell, it was Monseigneur Louis Duchesne (1843–1922) who had schooled von Hügel, starting in 1884 when they met for the first time.98 But von Hügel and Tyrrell were also committed to finding – and being found by – the divine in and through the materiality of past and present. Like Loisy, they accepted the distinction between history and faith, though they were more arduous in seeking to bridge the two, and like Loisy they understood faith as the totality of Christian experience through time. But more than he, they trusted to that experience as testimony to an immanent transcendence. This was not the experience of individuals, but of the community that formed individuals, and so in them came to expression. Both resisted reducing such experience to a monism, whether materialist or idealist, but insisted on the distinction between physical and spiritual, while also acknowledging – as Tyrrell had it – that though this

500

GERARD LOUGHLIN

distinction was not a difference in the world it cannot be given other than in worldly terms. It is hard enough to render the world in the terms we draw from it, and so even harder to render that which is not apart from, and yet distinct to, worldly life. “If the former knowledge is necessarily inadequate, the latter must be mysterious as well as inadequate; it must abound in seeming anomalies and paradoxes.”99 Here Tyrrell distinguishes between the world and God – who yet comes to us in the world – and between the reality of that divinely given and mediating world, constituted of physical, social, and spiritual relationships, and the language in which it is spoken. Thus we learn to distinguish between God as He is given in our experience and as He is represented in the constructions of our religious understanding; even as we do between Nature which presses and acts upon us as a whole, and Nature as known to us only in part – merely from the surface in contact – through the enigmatical constructions and symbols of science.100

Von Hügel came to name his own philosophical position as one of “critical realism” precisely because, as with Tyrrell, he recognized that Christian faith is a response to the appearing of the transcendent in the material, in the facts of history, but that all such appearing has to be apprehended in a process that is at once interpretive and faltering.101 If Duchesne had tutored von Hügel in history, it was Abbé Henri Huvelin (1838–1910) who nurtured his spirituality, and above all his sense that the transcendent comes to us, not in “out of the world” experiences, but in our experience of the world as such.102 It was also Huvelin who taught von Hügel to look for the mystical not outside the Church, but in and through ecclesial practice. This is why his great study of the “mystical element” is a study of a life in the Church – that of St. Catherine of Genoa. But the Church, for someone like von Hügel, also gave rise to a critical resistance that seemed to belie the possibility of finding God therein. This was indeed the tragedy that both von Hügel and Tyrrell experienced: the Church that fostered their longing for the unknown source of all at the same time denied their intellect. It was as if they could not live without that which destroyed one of them, and troubled both. Huvelin counseled prayer. Von Hügel was not to think that he could lay hold of truth, nor that others would understand the truth that he found, but it was truth that he was seeking, and doing so would be more important than maintaining orthodoxy. Conscience, conscientiousness, and charity come first.103 It was thus that von Hügel sought to understand the intellectual movements that troubled the church of his day, to interpret them to one another, and to reconcile all with what he thought essential in the Christian vision. Thus in his life he sought to reconcile the three elements that he discerned in religion: the institutional, intellectual, and spiritual; that which is given, that which receives, and the relationship that transcends both.104 Karl Rahner (1904–1984) once observed that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.”105 For Rahner, the mystical or spiritual is

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

501

central to Christian life because central to the realization of the “Christian reality” in each individual.106 And this will become ever more essential in the future – at least for such as European Christians – as the social support for Christian belief withers, and faith loses its former legitimation. “In such a situation the lonely responsibility of the individual in his decision of faith is necessary and required in a way much more radical than it was in former times.” A “solitary courage” will be required that “can exist only if it lives out of a wholly personal experience of God and his Spirit.”107 In their different ways, both von Hügel and Tyrrell saw something of Rahner’s future, as they too placed the spiritual at the heart of the Christian life, with intimations of its increasing importance for the religion that it both informed and was formed by. Tyrrell’s last, posthumously published book, Christianity at the CrossRoads (1909), is a tense and impassioned argument for Christ as mystic, and the Catholic Church as the mystical continuation of his life. “Through the mystical body, animated by the Spirit, we are brought into immediate contact with the ever present Christ…. The Church is not merely a society or school, but a mystery and sacrament; like the humanity of Christ of which it is an extension.”108 But the dying Tyrrell had been expelled from this body, denied its sacrament. As a modernist, he was without the solace and legitimation of the Church, dependent on his own inner faith and that of his friends. In this sense he was already the Christian that Rahner foresaw, requiring “the lonely courage analogous to that of the first martyrs of the first century of Christianity, the courage for a spiritual decision of faith, drawing its strength from itself and not needing to be supported by public agreement, particularly since even the Church’s public opinion does not so much sustain the individual in his decision of faith, but is itself sustained by the latter.”109 This, then, might be the legacy of the modernists: that they have already lived the crisis that is to come, that is perhaps always to come. For even now, is the Church not – in the words of George Tyrrell – “hastening to an impasse – to one of those extremities which are God’s opportunities?”110

Notes 1 Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). 2 Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (1879), paras. 27. 28. 3 Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, para. 29. 4 Pius X, Encyclical Letter (“Pascendi Gregis”) of Our Most Holy Lord Pius X by Divine Providence Pope on the Doctrines of the Modernists (London: Burns & Oates, 1907), 53 (§ 42). Hereafter referred to as Pascendi. 5 Pius X, Pascendi, 57 (§ 45). 6 George Tyrrell to Friedrich von Hügel, December 6, 1897; quoted in M. D. Petre, Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), 2:45. 7 Nicholas Sagovsky, “On God’s Side”: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 223.

502

GERARD LOUGHLIN

8 See Alec R. Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 17–18; and Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), app. 1, 232–234. For Vidler’s earlier study of modernism, see his The Modernist Movement in the Roman Catholic Church: Its Origins and Outcome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). 9 Pius X, Pascendi, 48 (§ 39). 10 Ibid., 51–53 (§§ 40, 41). 11 Ibid., 55 (§ 43). 12 Ibid., 65–66 (§ 55). 13 The oath is appended to Kerr’s Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 223–225. 14 Pius X, Pascendi, 48 (§ 39). 15 Alfred Loisy, Simples réflexions sur le décret du saint-office Lamentabili sane exitu et sur l’encyclique Pascendi dominici gregis (Ceffonds: Chez l’auteur, 1908). 16 Pius X, Pascendi, 6 (§ 4). It would seem that the first use of “modernism” in the pejorative sense deployed by the encyclical was in a pastoral letter issued by a group of Italian bishops in December 1905. See Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes 1830–1914, Oxford History of the Christian Church series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 354. 17 Pius X, Pascendi, 7 (§ 5). 18 Ibid., 8 (§ 7). 19 Ibid., 9 (§ 8). 20 Ibid., 10–11 (§ 9). 21 Ibid., 13–14 (§ 12). 22 Ibid., 35 (§ 28). 23 Ibid., 50–51 (§ 39). 24 Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 224. 25 Ibid., 223. 26 Admittedly there were few American modernists, perhaps only William L. Sullivan (1872–1935). See further John Ratté, Three Modernists: Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, William L. Sullivan (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968). North America gave rise to its own heresy, “Americanism,” condemned by Leo XII in Testem benevolentiae nostrae (1899). There is no room in the Church for republican or democratic values, for the license granted the citizen in a civil state. The Church enjoys the liberty of Christ. See further Thomas T. McAvoy, The Great Crisis in American Catholic History 1895– 1900 (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1957). 27 For the French context, discussed in relation to university education, see George H. Tavard, “Blondel’s Action and the Problem of the University,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142–168. For the Italian story, see Gary Lease, “Vatican Foreign Policy and the Origins of Modernism,” in Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 31–55; and for the European context more generally, Paul Misner, “Catholic Modernism: The Ecclesial Setting,” in Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 56–87. Both Lease and Misner show how modernism was harbingered by a more extended anti-modernism that Lease runs from 1870 to 1930 (55). See also Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

503

28 Lease, “Vatican Foreign Policy and the Origins of Modernism,” 42. 29 Wilfred Ward, quoted in Maisie Ward, The Wilfred Wards and the Transition, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1934–37), 2:322. 30 Thomas Michael Loome worries away at finding the correct terms in his Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, Modernism: A Contribution to a New Orientation in Modernist Research, Tübingen Theologische Studien 14 (Mainz: Mathias-GrünewaldVerlag, 1979). 31 For an account of Tyrrell’s death, see Sagovsky, “On God’s Side,” chap. 15. 32 Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:492–493. 33 On von Hügel, see further Michael de la Bedoyere, The Life of Baron von Hügel (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1951); and John J. Heaney, The Modernist Crisis: Von Hügel (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1968). 34 For a sense of this febrile atmosphere, see Ward, The Wilfred Wards, vol. 2, chap. 15 (“A Time of Trial”). For the European context more generally, see Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 355–359, which discusses Pius’s chief of secret police (UnderSecretary of State), Monsignor Umberto Benigni. 35 Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:189. 36 Ward, The Wilfred Wards, vol. 1, chap. 7 (“Finding a Life Work”). 37 See, respectively, Wilfred Ward, William George Ward and the Oxford Movement (London: Macmillan, 1889); Wilfred Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival (London: Macmillan, 1893); Wilfred Ward, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman, 2 vols. (London: Longmans & Co., 1898); and Wilfred Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 2 vols. (London: Longmans & Co., 1912). See also Sheridan Gilley, “Ward, William George (1812–1882),” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 38 See further Paschal Scotti, Out of Due Time: Wilfred Ward and the Dublin Review (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006). 39 Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 1:134. 40 Inevitably, Mrs. Wilfred Ward was compared with the far more successful Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose Robert Elsmere (1888) – about an Anglican priest who loses his faith to the higher criticism – had been a bestseller in both Britain and America. G. K. Chesterton suggested a comic opera in which the two Wards would perform a duet with the refrain, “We write the knobby novels of the day.” Cited in Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:110. 41 Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists, 154. 42 Modernism was explored in various contemporary and near-contemporary novels, such as William L. Sullivan’s The Priest: A Tale of Modernism in New England (1911); Jean Nesmy’s La Lumière de la Maison (1909); Roger Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois (1913), which portrays the French liberal Catholic Marcel Hébert; and Paul Bourget’s Le Démon de Midi (1914) – “a salad of Modernism and of adultery” (Albert Houtin to Loisy; cited in Vidler, A Variety, 154). Other French novels were Albert Autin’s L’Anathème (1921); and Joseph Malègue’s anti-modernist Augustin ou le Maître est là (1933). Ireland produced Gerald O’Donovan’s Father Ralph (1913). 43 Indeed, according to Maisie, Wilfred did write some parts of the novel. See Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:240.

504

GERARD LOUGHLIN

44 On Lamennais see Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 18–19, 62–112; and Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 12–31. Out of Due Time was not the only novel to retell Lamennais’ story. There was Emile Zola’s Rome (1895–1896), the second of his Les Trois Villes trilogy; and Antonio Fogazzaro’s Il Santo (1905), which also told the story of a liberal who misguidedly appeals to the pope. It was a sensation, and immediately translated into English – as The Saint, translated by M. Prichard-Agnetti (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906) – but in the same year was also placed on the Index of Forbidden Books (on April 5). 45 It seems that the papal audience would have led Lamennais and his friends to have hoped for the best. See Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 21–22. 46 Lamennais initially submitted to Gregory XVI’s judgment. But in 1834 the pope also condemned – in the encyclical Singulari nos (June 25) – Lamennais’ Les Paroles d’un Croyant (Words of a Believer), itself published that year. It was this that led him to finally withdraw from active engagement in the Church. In the following years he produced several significant works, the most notable of which was his three-volume Esquisse d’une Philosophie (1840). 47 There was no modernist journal in Britain, though on the Continent there were several that promoted historical biblical criticism, such as the Revue biblique and L’Enseignement biblique. In 1896 Loisy became editor of the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuse. In 1898 Italy saw the start of Cultura sociale, and in 1901 Studi religiosi. All of these were favorable to modernism. 48 Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:240. 49 Quoted in ibid., 2:239–240. 50 See Mrs. Wilfred Ward, Out of Due Time (London: Longmans & Co., 1906), 5; and Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:200. 51 Mrs. Wilfred Ward, Out of Due Time, 39–40. Sutcliffe wants the Church “to understand that there was a world of thought, and of thinkers, almost unknown to them as they sat at home at ease in faith and plenty. He wanted them to understand how the usual text-books used by Catholics in this country, were not only inadequate to express the great truths of religion, but were almost unintelligible to those who had been educated in the language of a new civilization. Greek may be a finer language than English, but it is not usually of so much use in dealing with the inhabitants of the British Isles” (46). 52 Ibid., 41. 53 Ibid., Out of Due Time, 38. 54 In 1896 von Hügel wrote to William Sanday (1843–1920) requesting that he write an article on Loisy. “If it could take the form of a cordial welcome, expressed by yourself but as, you were sure, shared by numerous Anglican scholars and savants, and of gladness at seeing the Roman Church resuming its best traditions in this matter, and of certainty as to the importance of the work being able to be continued and finished – or some such thoroughly friendly inter-confessional form, – you wd. do much good, I am very sure.” Von Hügel to Sanday, August 1, 1896. The article, “The Work of Abbé Loisy,” duly appeared in The Guardian (August 26, 1896). 55 See Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 71. 56 Ward, Out of Due Time, 52. 57 Ibid., 101.

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

505

58 Ibid., 175. 59 See David Hume, Natural History of Religion (1757). 60 For this story see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). 61 Alfred Loisy, Études bibliques, 3rd ed. (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1903); cited in Bernard Reardon, ed., Roman Catholic Modernism, with intro. by Bernard Reardon (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970), 20. The first edition of Études bibliques had been published in 1894, and the second in 1901. 62 Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (1983), para. 20. 63 Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, para. 21. 64 Ibid., para. 22. 65 For a detailed account of these arguments, see Lawrence F. Barmann, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Modernist Crisis in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), chap. 3, 38–53. 66 George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 92; and Alfred Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1902). 67 Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1900); translated into English as What Is Christianity? trans. T. B. Saunders (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904). 68 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845; rev. ed., London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1878). For Loisy on Newman, see his Memoires pour servir à la l’histoire religieuse de notre temps, 3 vols. (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1930–1931), 2:560f.; and for Tyrrell’s views, see Christianity at the Cross-Roads, chap. 5, 29–34. 69 Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 29. For Wilfred’s fears, see Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:559–562. On Newman’s relation to modernism, see further Arthur Hilary Jenkins, ed., John Henry Newman and Modernism, Internationale Cardinal-NewmanStudien 14 (Sigmaringendorf: Glock und Lutz, 1990). 70 Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, 32. 71 “Revelation is realized in man, but it is the work of God in him, with him and by him.” Alfred Loisy, Autour d’un petit livre (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1903), 197. 72 For twenty-first-century attempts, see Graham Gould and Richard A. Burridge, Jesus Now and Then (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004); Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays, eds., Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2008); and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 73 Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 44. 74 This point is not exactly Tyrrell’s, since he supposed his own account of Jesus to be more than just his own reflection. Presenting what he deemed to be the “assured results of criticism” (xv), he argued for Jesus as – in Albert Schweitzer’s words (when noting Tyrrell’s indebtedness to his work) – an “ethical Apocalyptist who by his very nature was not Protestant but Catholic.” Albert Schweitzer, My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, trans. C. T. Campion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933), 64. 75 The centrality of historical criticism was attested, contra Pascendi, in the anonymously published Il Programma dei modernisti (1907): “So far from our philosophy dictating our critical method, it is the critical method that has, of its own accord,

506

76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84

85

86

87

88 89 90 91

GERARD LOUGHLIN

forced us to a very tentative and uncertain formulation of various philosophical conclusions, or better still, to a clearer exposition of certain ways of thinking to which Catholic apologetic has never been wholly a stranger” (quoted in Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, 212). The program was the work of Ernesto Buonaiutti (1881–1946), whose involvement in modernism – “a youthful mistake” – he described in his autobiography, Il Pellegrino di Roma (1945). See Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, 52–59. See Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists, 79. Robert Dell to A. L. Lilley, March 31, 1908; cited in ibid., 81–82. Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists, 82. See Maurice Blondel, “Histoire et dogme: les lacunes philosophiques de l’exégèse moderne,” La Quinzaine (January–February 1904); and in English in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995 [1964]). “What I am criticizing is the thesis of the water-tight compartment between history and dogma, and of the incommensurability of assertions of faith and of truths of fact; and still more, of course, the thesis of an opposition between them which results in double-thinking” (“History and Dogma,” 258n1). For von Hügel’s response, see his “Du Christ eternal et de nos christologies successives,” La Quinzane (June 1, 1904). See further Barmann, Baron Friedrich von Hügel, 120–123; and, more extensively, Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, ch. 4. Blondel, “History and Dogma,” 226–231. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 267. Maurice Blondel, L’Action: essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1893); in English as Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). “All knowers know God implicitly in all they know” (Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 22, a. 2, ad 1); “All things, desiring their own perfection desire God himself ” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, prima pars, q. 6, a. 1, ad 2). Henri de Lubac, Sur les chemins de Dieu (Paris: Aubier, 1956); and in English as The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996 [1960]). “[T]he idea of God is mysteriously present in us from the beginning, prior to our concepts, although beyond our grasp without their help, and prior to all our argumentation, in spite of being logically unjustifiable without them: it is the inspiration, the motive power and justification of them all” (39). See Kerr, Twentieth–Century Catholic Theologians, 78. See Karl Rahner’s study in Thomistic theology, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968 [1957]). “[M]an encounters himself when he finds himself in the world and when he asks about God; and when he asks about his essence, he always finds himself already in the world and on the way to God. He is both these at once, and cannot be one without the other” (406). Pius X, Pascendi, 8–9 (§§ 7–8). Ibid., 16 (§ 14). See Alec Vidler, “The Enigma Resolved?” in A Variety of Catholic Modernists, 40–62. George Tyrrell to A. L. Lilley, August 14, 1908; cited in Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists, 117–118.

CATHOLIC MODERNISM

92 93

507

Barmann, Friedrich von Hügel, 140. “During these years [Tyrrell’s] friendship with Baron von Hügel was steadily growing. This friendship my mother [Josephine Ward] always maintained was his undoing…. [T]he Baron, instead of trying to develop what was there, tried to turn Tyrrell into something quite unlike himself. He made him learn German and read modern German philosophy. He introduced him to Loisy and Biblical criticism. And the results were disastrous.” Ward, The Wilfred Wards, 2:187; see also 2:499. Ward’s sometimes seemingly bitchy account leaves us in doubt as to what Family Ward thought of the Baron: “The Baron had a unique power of opening windows on to almost infinite vistas, but he had no power whatever of gauging another man’s mind. He had certain ideals of what needed doing for the Church, and he valued all his friends primarily for their utility to this end” (187). The Baron was a user, and Tyrrell abused, but also vulnerable, and possibly inviting abuse because of lacking a chin. “It seems absurd to feel, as I often did, that had Fr. Tyrrell’s chin been different the course of events would have been changed or at least modified. The almost total absence of this feature surely expressed or at least symbolized a weakness that one quickly realized. He reflected almost like a looking-glass the ideas of a stronger personality in his company.” Maisie Ward, Unfinished Business (London, 1964), 53. This estimation of Tyrrell, and of his relationship to von Hügel, is reflected in the character of Fr. Colnes in Out of Due Time. Fr. Colnes is too much taken with the Count, reads too much in the critical literature, and temporarily flees his parish. Happily he is later brought to his senses. “That he was very sensitive could easily be seen from a first glance at the pale, thin features and transparent eyelids and nostrils. His eyes were pale too, and his large mouth was weak. Some conditions of nerves sharpen perceptions, and Fr Colnes knew what people felt towards him almost as acutely as if he had been a dog” (Ward, Out of Due Time, 14). 94 Maude Petre, Von Hügel and Tyrrell: The Story of a Friendship (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1937), 118–120. 95 See Lawrence Barmann, “The Modernist as Mystic,” in Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 215–247, 231. 96 Von Hügel to Tyrrell, November 17, 1899; cited in Barmann, “The Modernist as Mystic,” 232. See also Friedrich von Hügel, “Father Tyrrell: Some Memorials of the Last Twelve Years of His Life,” The Hibbert Journal, 8 (1910). 97 Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1961 [1923]), 1:vii. Von Hügel’s tribute had been less fulsome in the first edition (1908), where he acknowledged the many “insights into mysticism” of two of Tyrrell’s books, Hard Sayings (1898) and Faith of the Millions (1901). But at the time Tyrrell’s name was not to be invoked lightly if one wished to evade the “organized company of delators” (von Hügel to Maude Petre, 3 July 1906; cited in Barmann, “The Modernist as Mystic,” 231n47). Tyrrell had in fact corrected the proofs, and suggested changes. 98 See Barmann, “The Modernist as Mystic,” 223. 99 George Tyrrell, Lex Orandi or Prayer and Creed (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 68. 100 Tyrrell, Lex Orandi, 70. Tyrrell’s distinctions are of course those of Thomas Aquinas, and he appended a note on “The Meaning of ‘Analogous” (80–83) to his chapter on “Belief in God” (71–80). Tyrrell well understood that the difference

508

101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110

GERARD LOUGHLIN

between God and world is a different difference from those between things in the world, even the difference between object and idea. “Man cannot deal practically with what the heart of man has never conceived, with what is neither the self nor the non-self; with what is as distinct from him as the latter, yet quite differently distinct; as close to him as the former, yet quite differently close; with a relation that is necessarily sui generis and unknown to finite experience; he cannot deal with the Absolute in its absoluteness” (77). Von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 1:xvi. Barmann, “The Modernist as Mystic,” 223. See Barmann, “The Modernist as Mystic,” 226–227. Von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 1:60. See further Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, chap. 6. Karl Rahner, “The Spirituality of the Church of the Future,” in Theological Investigations (London: Longman, Darton & Todd, 1981) 20:143–153, 20:149. Ellen Leonard espies a close resemblance between Tyrrell’s vision and that of Karl Rahner in The Shape of the Church to Come, trans. and intro. by Edward Quinn (London: SPCK, 1974 [1972]). See Leonard, George Tyrrell, 137. Rahner, “The Spirituality of the Church of the Future,” 143. Ibid., 149. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 275. Rahner, “The Spirituality of the Church of the Future,” 149. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 282.

Bibliography Daly, Gabriel, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Kerr, Fergus, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Vidler, Alec R., A Variety of Catholic Modernists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Index

Abbott, Lyman, 151 abolitionism, 324, 347, 349 Adler, Adolph Peter, 111 aesthetics/aestheticism, 176, 402–3, 405, 408–9, 417, 456 agnosticism, xii, 122, 127, 158–9, 413, 488 Akvilonov, E. P.: On the Saviour and Salvation, 230 Alcott, Louisa M.: Little Women, 354n.35 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond: Encyclopédie, 10 Alexander, Archibald, 322, 326 American Bible Society, 236 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 243 American Exceptionalism, 340, 345 American Transcendentalists, 90, 183, 323, 339–57; see also Emerson, Ralph Waldo Ammundsen, Valdemar, 97 Anabaptists, 197 anarchism, 423 Ancillon, Johann Peter Friedrich, 305 Andersen, Hans Christian, 99; Only a Fiddler, 102 Anderson, Rufus, 243 Anglican Communion, 241 Anglican Evangelicals, 121, 235–6, 241, 244–5, 248 Anglican Theology, 269–70, 288–9

Anglicanism, 119, 235, 269, 280–300, 323, 332, 458, 463–4, 503n.40, 504n.54; see also England, Church of Anglo-Catholicism, 237; see also Newman, John Henry Anselm, St, 378, 480 Anthony, Archimandrite, 219–21; Dogmatic Theology, 219 Anthony, Metropolitan, 232 anthropocentrism, 114, 198 anthropology, 141, 206–7, 226–32, 419, 477; Christian anthropology, 153, 191, 195, 197–8, 215, 220, 223, 255, 303, 310, 377, 383–4, 387, 389 Anti-Christ, 427 Anti-Climacus, see Kierkegaard, Søren anti-semitism, 433n.64; see also Judaism anti-theology, xii, 412–33 Apolinarianism, 271 apologetics, 42, 49, 148–50, 190, 221, 243, 307, 309, 385, 477, 488 apostolic succession, 123, 323 Aquinas, St Thomas, 47, 53, 191, 285, 302, 376, 378–80, 388–9, 391, 392n.1, 392n.18, 486–7, 490, 498–9, 506n.85, 507n.100; Summa theologiae, 378; see also Thomism argument from design, 17–19, 143, 239, 247 Arians, 199

510

INDEX

Aristotelianism, 304–5, 379, 381, 386 Aristotle, 14, 23, 61, 378–9, 490; Metaphysics, 11, 12; Nicomachean Ethics, 24 Arminianism, 235, 241, 248, 324, 340 Arminius, Jacobus, 241–2, 353n.5 art, 71, 178; beauty, 26, 63; religion, 417; truth, 63 Athanasius, 94n.41, 199–200 atheism, 122, 133, 153, 166–70, 172–4, 176, 178, 182, 207, 326, 341, 349, 370, 401, 412–33, 488 atonement, 43, 233n.7, 236–7, 241, 246, 248, 284, 285–6, 288, 331, 347, 350, 361–3, 366–8, 372, 458–9; as moral governance, 324; penal, 237, 365–6; substitutionary, 237, 246, 324, 366; universal, 240, 363 Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis, 396, 404, 410n.30 Aufklärung, 188–192, 198, 206; see also Enlightenment Augsburg Confession, 329, 456 Augustine, St, xii, 302, 322–3, 378–9, 443; City of God, 414; Confessions, 414; De Trinitate, 82; on the Trinity, 82, 266; anti-Pelegius, 24; original sin, 106; psychology, 326 Augustinianism, 82, 324, 350, 378–9, n.18 Austen, Jane, 396, 406–7; Mansfield Park, 407 Australia, 241 authority: biblical, 303; ecclesiastical, 4, 124, 126, 129–30; of the Law, 303; papal, 199; of Scripture, 124; of tradition, 4, 319 Autin, Albert, 503n.42 Bacon, Francis, 239, 321–2, 401 Baier, W. C.: Compendium, 327 Bain, Alexander, 158, 159; The Senses and the Intellect, 269 Bakunin, M. A., 424–5, 432n.54 Bañez, Domingo, 379 baptism, 123, 223, 237, 323, 421 Baptist Missionary Society, 243

Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, 237, 248 Baptists, 235, 239–41, 248, 319, 327; Free Will Baptists, 241; General Baptists, 241, 248; Primitive Baptists, 241 Barnes, W. E., 466 Barth, Karl, 31–2, 53, 55n.1, 73–4n.12, 114, 147–8, 160, 363, 426, 448, 481, 484n.47; Church Dogmatics, 53, 83; Commentary on Romans (1919), 433n.58; Doctrine of God, 83 Baudelaire, Charles, 414 Bauer, Bruno, 418, 431n.19 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 70, 190–2, 197, 312, 333, 431n.19, 458, 460, 466, 469, 472, 482n.14 Bautain, Louis-Eugène-Marie, 188 Bavinck, H., 372 Bayle, Pierre, 5, 167 beauty, 25–6; see also sublime, the Beddoes, Thomas, 400 Beecher, Henry Ward, 151 Belgic Confession, 369 Bellamy, Joseph, 240 Bellarmine, Robert, 191, 379 Belyaev, A. D., 228–9; Divine Love, 228–9 Berdyaev, Nikolai A., 231, 232 Berkeley, George, 5 Betkovsky, V., 232 Bible, 63, 88, 123–4, 151, 154, 194, 236, 238, 246, 281, 295, 303, 321, 325, 350, 414, 436, 455–67; authority, 153–4, 236, 303, 395; canon, 471; and church, 408; historical criticism, 281, 285, 288, 399, 400, 402, 435, 439; history, 151, 281, 285, 296 302, 404, 459, 471; inerrancy, 326; infallibility, 88, 154; inspiration, 236, 310, 396; interpretation, 152, 154, 269, 395– 411; as literature, 396–402, 404; mythology, 399, 417–18, narrative, 396, 402–9; revelation, 124, 154, 236, 303, 321, 474; translation, 216, 219, 223–4, 333, 398, 401; word of God, 236, 407; see also Scripture

INDEX

biblical criticism, xii, 89–90, 247, 252, 269, 323, 339, 349, 405, 407, 418, 455–7, 463, 490, 492; form criticism, 273; higher criticism 396–402, 407, 494–5, 503n.40 biblical exegesis, 43, 44, 281, 408, 471 biblical theology/doctrine, 241–2, 321, 325, 350, 368, 436, 455–67, 472 Bickersteth, Edward: A Scripture Help, 236 Biedermann, Alois Emmanuel, 469, 472, 477 Birks, T. R., 247 Benigni, Umberto, 503n.34 Bergson, Henri, 157–8 Blair, Hugh, 400–1 Blake, William, 93n.32, 401, 408 Blondel, Maurice, 158, 497–8, 506n.80; L’Action, 158, 498 Bolshevism, 430 Bonaventure, St, 376, 379, n.18 Bonnetty, Augustin, 382 Bosanquet, Bernard, 71 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 414 Bourget, Paul, 503n.42 Bousset, Wilhelm, 434, 436–8; Kyrios Christos, 437 Boutroux, Emile, 157–8 Bowie, Andrew, 40, 56n.9 Bowne, Borden P., 350 Boxadors, John Thomas de, 380 Bradley, F. H., 71 Brainerd, David, 243 Bremond, Henri, 490 Brethren (Plymouth), 245–6 Bretschneider, Karl, 45 Briggs, C. A., 466 Britain, 143, 254, 268–73, 282, 288, 400, 402, 455, 457–8, 464–6, 493, 503n.40, 504n.47; Catholic Emancipation, 87–8; congregationalism, 246; evangelicalism, 235; General Strike, 294; government, 87; Labour Party, 286, 293–4; monarchy, 87; unitarianism, 400, 460, 465 British and Foreign Bible Society, 236 British idealism, 58, 71–2, 74n.22 Brown, F., 466

511

Brownson, Orestes, 128–9, 341, 344, 354n.39 Bruce, A. B., 367; The Humiliation of Christ, 269 Brunner, Emil, 448 Buber, Martin, 114 Buchanan, President James, 334 Büchner, Ludwig, 142 Buckland, William: Geology and Mineralogy, 144 Buddhism, 417, 444, 446, 448 Budrin, E. A., 231 Bukharev, Aleksandr, 228 Bulgakov, Mikhail Petrovich, see Makarius, Archimandrite (Mikhail Petrovich Bulgakov) Bulgakov, Sergius, 273 Bultmann, Rudolf, 147–8, 160, 468, 481 Bunsen, C. C. J., 458, 463; God in History, 458 Buonaiutti, Ernesto, 506n.75 Burke, Edmund, 5, 25 Bushnell, Horace, 90, 246, 323, 332, 334, 346–9, 355nn.47–8, 53, 61, 64–5, 356n.68, 70, 75, 90; Christian Nurture, 346; God in Christ, 246, 347; The Vicarious Sacrifice, 246 Butler, Joseph: Analogy of Religion, 9 Buzzetti, Vincenzo, 381 Byron, Lord, 413 Caird, Edward, 70, 71 Caird, John, 70, 71–2, 75n.25; The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 71 Cajetan, Thomas, 379 Calhoun, Senator John, 325 Calvin, John, 326, 332, 361–2, 364 Calvinism, 156, 235, 240–2, 248, 307, 323, 327, 339–40, 370–2 Cambridge Platonism, 91n.5, 173 Campbell of Row, John McLeod, 358–67, 370–2; The Nature of the Atonement, 365–7 Campbell, Reginald J., 283 Camus, Albert, 114 Capreolus, John, 379 Carey, William, 243 Carlyle, Thomas, 360

512

INDEX

Carové, F. W., 69 Cartesianism, 171–3, 382–4, 387; see also Descartes, René Cappadoccian Fathers, 94n.41, 361–2 catechism(s), 194, 248, 364; see also Heidelberg Catechism; Westminster Catechism Catherine of Genoa, St, 500 Catherine the Great, 399 Catholic Apostolic Church, 360–3; see also Irving, Edward Catholic Church, see Roman Catholic Church Catholic Tübingen School, 187–213 Cervantes, 181; Don Quixote, 403 Chalcedonean christology, see christology: two natures Chalmers, Thomas, 240, 243, 360 Channing, William Ellery, 341 charismatic tradition, 361, 363, 373; see also Pentecostal tradition Charlemagne, 206 Chateaubriand, 404, 406; The Genius of Christianity, 408 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 396 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai: What is to be done?, 424 Chesterton, G. K., 503n.40 Cheyne, T. K., 465–6 China, 403; China Inland Mission, 246 Christendom, 73, 327, 351–2 Christian Social Union, 289, 292–3 Christian Socialist Movement, 285–7 Christianity: absoluteness; uniqueness; particularity, 435, 438–40, 477 christocentrism, 195, 197, 199 christology, 43–6, 196, 209, 226, 228, 268, 295, 305, 310, 312–13, 317n.66, 322, 331, 343, 347–8, 358, 361–3, 372, 480–1; Alexandrine, 368, 373; kenotic, xii, 230, 251–79, 289, 295, 311–14, 317 nn.66, 68; and soteriology, 43–4, 283; two natures, 45, 54, 69, 109–10, 197, 199, 228, 251–79, 281, 283, 285, 288, 305, 309, 312–13, 354n.32, 360, 362, 373, 480; see also Jesus Christ

church, 193, 200, 331, 333, 395, 417, 477, 489, 491, 495–7, 500; authority, 110, 200–1, 203–4, 206–7, 209, 227, 308, 382, 470, 490, 496–7; body of Christ, 199, 222, 331, 333; community, 205, 221, 228, 233n.7, 285–6, 291–2, 309, 342, 413, 435, 471, 473–6, 479; and culture, 232, 324, 358–9, 370–1, 473, 475, 477; denominations, 195; history, 49, 54–5, 127–8, 190, 217, 225, 308, 437, 464, 472, 482n.14, 496; infallibility, 219–22; as Kingdom of God, 199, 209, 310; and sacraments, 200, 209, 340; and society, 112, 202–3, 324, 352, 470; and state/nation, 112–13, 189–91, 194, 201–5, 207–8, 213n.43, 294, 321, 326, 369–71, 470, 492, 502n.26; tradition, 188, 193, 200, 209, 345; universal, 222; visible/invisible, 124, 130, 199–200, 206, 222, 327–8; and world, 52, 194, 475, 477, 498 Church Missionary Society, 243 Church, Richard, 127 civil rights, 492; see also human rights Clausen, H. N., 100 Clifford, John, 248 Clifford, W. K., 159 Cohen, Hermann, 72 Colenso, J. W., 462; The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, 464 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 76–96, 182–3, 243–6, 280–1, 284, 323, 341, 360, 400–3, 407, 410n.41; Aids to Reflection, 78, 86, 94n.42, 94n.56, 94n.59, 95n.64, 346; Biographia Literaria, 92n.26, 93n.36, 95n.63; “Christabel,” 80–1; Confessio Fidei, 93n.36, 94n.42; Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 88–9, 95n.61; On the Constitution of Church and State, according to the Idea of Each, 87; “Dejection,” 81, 93n.33; “The Destiny of Nations,” 79, 86; “The Destruction of the Bastille,” 76; “France: An Ode,” 76; The Friend, 91n.7, 91n.11, 93n.36; “Frost at Midnight,” 80; “Kubla Khan,”

INDEX

81; Logic, 91n.10, 93n.36; Logosophia, or Opus Maximum, 83–4, 89, 92n.20, 93n.36, 94n.45, 94n.48; Lyrical Ballads, 79, 86, 182; Notebooks, 87; “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 81; The Statesman’s Manual, 80, 86, 88–9, 91n.7 Common Sense philosophy (Scottish), 154, 239, 241, 321–3, 330–1, 335n.7, 364; see also Reid, Thomas communion, holy, 242, 421 communism, 207, 422 Comte, Auguste, 157; Positivist Catechism, 414 confessional theology, xiii, 188, 195–6, 201–2, 206, 208, 241, 282, 301, 305, 315n.4, 319–39, 345, 358–73, 379–80, 441, 473, 481 confessions, 216–17, 471; see also Belgic Confession; Lutheran Confessions; Westminster Confession Congregationalism, 235, 239–40, 242, 246, 248, 320, 334 consciousness, 40, 44, 50–2, 54, 252, 265–6, 290, 306, 308–9, 343, 382, 420–2, 470, 474, 479, 497 Constantin Constantius, see Kierkegaard, Søren conversion, 237–8, 242, 331; of the world, 239 “Copernican Revolution,” 3, 6, 37, 154 Copernicus: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 9 cosmological argument, 17–18, 147; Kant’s critique, 18–19 cosmology, 160, 310, 391 Council of Trent, 198 Counter-Reformation, 379; see also Catholic Reformation covenant theology, see federal theology Cowper, William, 401 creation, 14, 51, 64, 66, 69, 81, 133, 144, 193–4, 196, 198, 217, 266, 283, 302, 304, 310, 331, 349, 364; doctrine of, 85, 152–3, 195–6, 370, 379; and providence, 194, 196, 309–10, 314; in scripture, 86, 152, 326

513

Creeds, 124, 283, 295–6, 358, 369 Cross of Christ, 223, 229, 236–8, 283, 288, 368 crucifixion, 290; of the flesh, 218 culture, 189, 346, 478, 409, 430, 476–8; and religion/faith, 344, 354n.37, 359, 370, 372, 391, 408, 414, 472, 475; cultural Protestantism, 473, 476 Cupitt, Don, 296 Curci, Carlo Maria, 381 Dante, 181, 407, 487 Darby, J. N., 245 Darwin, Charles, 143, 149–51, 153–4, 247, 350, 414, 431n.6; The Descent of Man, 153; Origin of Species, 149, 152–3, 155–6, 247, 268 Darwinism, xii, 131, 142, 150–5, 159, 326, 349, 350–1, 443, 479 Daub, Karl, 70, 315n.4, 431n.19 Davidson, A. B., 465–6 Davidson, Randall, 294 Davison, Samuel: Sacred Hermeneutics, 461; The Text of the Old Testament, 461 de Lagarde, Paul, 435 de Lamennais, Félicité, 492–3, 504n.44, n.45, n.46; Esquisse d’une Philosophie, 504n.46; Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, 492; Les Paroles d’un Croyant, 504n.46 de Loris, Guillome: Roman de la Rose, 410n.29 de Lubac, Henri, 209, 431, 498, 506n.86 de Meun, Jean: Roman de la Rose, 410n.29 de Molina, Luis, 379 de Montalembert, Charles, 492 de Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht, 455–8, 460–5; Einleitung, 461 De Wulf, Maurice, 377–8, 381 death of God, 378, 429 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 404 deism, 62, 68, 150–1, 154, 179, 189, 191–2, 196, 198, 201–2, 314, 317n.61, 319, 322, 340, 361 Delitzsch, Franz, 459–60 Denmark, 70, 99–102; Church of, 101–2; Frederick VII, 99 Denney, James, 358–9, 366–8, 370–2

514

INDEX

Descartes, René, 5, 12, 15, 18, 25, 27, 61, 81, 302, 383, 389; Meditations, 27; “Turn to the subject,” 383; see also Cartesianism determinism, 7, 156–7, 159, 169–70, 174, 181, 197–8, 240–1, 443, 446 Deussen, Paul, 417 Dewar, E. H., 457 dialectic(s), 33–42, 49, 93n.38, 107–9, 191–2, 198, 203, 206, 221, 304, 329, 332–3, 443, 449, 459, 472, 490 dialectical theology, 468, 481 Dickens, Charles, 407 Diderot, Denis: Encyclopédie, 10; see also Alembert, Jean le Rond d’ Dilthey, Wilhelm, 55n.4, 408 Dimock, Nathaniel: The Doctrine of the Sacraments dispensationalism, 245 divine humanity, 151–2, 227–8, 419, 425–6, 430 Dobrosmyslov, D., 232 docetism, 252, 262, 268 doctrine, 9, 64–5, 69, 71, 193–4, 200, 202, 205, 208–9, 216, 221, 246, 307, 319, 322, 329, 332, 367–8, 377–8, 385, 392n.5, 414, 470–4, 477, 480; history of, 123, 127–30, 190, 253, 385, 437 Doddridge, Philip, 236 Dods, Marcus, 367 dogmatic theology, 49, 115, 141, 189–90, 194–5, 215, 218, 221, 226, 228, 231, 252, 264, 303, 307–9, 368, 384–5, 435–6, 439, 441–8 dogmatism, 11, 232, 280, 329, 435 Dooyeweerd, H., 372 Dorner, Isaak A., 253, 255, 301, 307–14, 317n.56, 317n.66; History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 269, 307; System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 309–10, 313 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 226–8, 232, 234n.8, 425–6, 430; The Brothers Karamazov, 227, 425–6; Crime and Punishment, 227; Demons, 227, 425–6 Doudney, D. A., 241 Douglas, Senator Stephen, 324

Draper, John William, 141–2; History of the Conflict between Religion and Science Drey, Johann Sebastian (von) 187–203, 206, 210n.12, 211n.16, 212n.26, 385; Apologetik, 203, 211n.25; Kurze Einleitung in das Studium der Theologie, 193–4 Driver, S. R., 466; Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, 465 Drummond, Henry, 143–4, 151, 247–8, 363, 367; The Ascent of Man, 144–5; Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 143–4, 247 du Gard, Roger Martin, 503n.42 dualism, 6, 12, 59, 85, 148, 150, 172–3, 283, 371, 384, 439 Duchesne, Louis, 499–500 Duff, Alexander, 243 Dutch Reformed Church, 368 Duhm, Bernhard, 435, 462 Dulles, Cardinal Avery, 130 Ebrard, Johannes Heinrich August, 260–2; Christliche Dogmatik, 261; Das Dogma vom heiligen Abendmahl und seine Geschichte, 261; Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte, 261 ecclesiology, 121, 197, 199–200, 209, 217, 222, 228, 232, 244, 268, 323, 324–5, 330–1, 336n.17 ecumenical councils, 192 ecumenicism, 202, 209, 294–5, 307, 330–4 Edwards, Jonathan, 239–41, 243, 319, 323, 339–41, 346, 353n.1, 354n.32, 365; Freedom of the Will, 240 Edwardsean idealism, 240–1, 321 Eichhorn, Albert, 434 Eichhorn, Johann, 399–400 election, doctrine of, 83, 123, 240, 364–5, 405 Eliot, George, 89, 269, 407, 458 Eliot, T. S., 88 Ellicott, Bishop: Christus Comprobatur, 270 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 183, 334, 339–48, 351, 354 (nn.18, 24, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38), 355n.53 Emmons, Nathaniel, 240

INDEX

empiricism, 5, 11, 16, 60, 77, 79, 84, 132, 239, 242, 302, 304, 309, 321, 331, 345, 422, 447 Engels, Friedrich: The German Ideology, 422; Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 418 England, 70, 239, 280–300, 359, 395, 400, 403, 408, 457, 465–6, 494; Church of, 71, 119–22, 125–7, 241, 244–5, 247, 280–300; church and state, 294; Nonconformity, 119–20, 128, 461; Revolution (1688), 4; Roman Catholicism, 491; Romanticism, 40, 165, 183; Unitarianism, 400; Utilitarianism; 414 Enlightenment, xi, 6, 59, 62, 68, 76–9, 167, 189, 238, 239–47, 252, 302, 319, 322, 327, 339, 340, 343, 345, 348, 353n.1, 360, 375, 380n.39, 418, 469, 470, 494 episcopacy, 121, 126, 199–200, 206, 492 Episcopalianism, 321; see also Anglicanism epistemology, 3, 14, 16–17, 19, 34, 36–8, 60–1, 71, 77–8, 80–1, 84, 92n.27, 104, 122, 147, 214, 222, 321, 331, 359, 377, 379, 383–9, 439; and ontology, 14, 302 Erasmus, 379 Erdmann, J. E., 414, 431n.19 Erskine of Linlathen, Thomas, 368 eschatology, 54, 145, 208, 244–5, 291, 351, 353n.1, 363, 445–8, 463, 476–7, 481 essence of Christianity, 49, 440, 471–3, 479 essence of religion, 342 Eucharist, 63, 229, 232, 244, 261, 345, 499 eudaemonism, 442 eugenics, 153 Eutycheanism, 361–2; see also charismatic tradition Evangelical Alliance, 332 Evangelicalism, 120–1, 123, 125, 235–50, 329, 331, 333, 349; Bible, 236; centrality of the Cross, 236;

515

ecclesiology, 244; and the Enlightenment, 238–43; liberal evangelicalism, 246–8; missions, 238–43; Revival, 235–6; and Romanticism, 243–8; social gospel, 247–8; soteriology, 236; theology, 236, 330 Evangelische Kirche, 316n.33; see also Germany: Protestantism Evans, Mary Ann, 458; see also Eliot, George evil, 23, 83–5, 94n.59, 194, 223, 283, 302, 321, 324, 352, 354n.28, 366, 416, 447; good and evil, 103, 220, 223–4, 231, 324, 447 evolution, xii, 131, 133, 145, 149, 150–4, 247, 284, 287–8, 326, 349, 488; see also Darwinism existence, 12, 81, 108, 114; human, 345–7; meaning, 97; as a predicate, 18–19; proofs, 17–18; see also God: existence existentialism, 107–8, 113–15, 147–8, 160, 223, 228, 231–2, 328, 359, 373, 378, 427 expiation, 215, 217, 220–3, 229–32 Ewald, Heinrich, 458, 461, 464–5; History of Israel, 458, 465 Fairbarin, A. M.: The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 270 faith, 105, 109, 112, 114–15, 128, 171, 203, 218, 227, 230, 246, 268, 304, 306, 309, 359, 364, 368, 437, 441, 449, 465, 470, 472, 475, 477–8, 480, 488, 495–9, 501; and doctrine, 307, 310, 326, 474; and history, xii, 495, 499; and reason, 105, 171–2, 175, 198, 302–3, 305, 309, 321, 375–94; and revelation, 154, 302–3, 375; and works, 195, 215 Fall, the, 51, 64–5, 85–6, 95n.61, 106, 151, 215, 217, 220, 222–3, 231, 236, 364, 445, 459 fascism, 427, 430 fatalism, 169–170, 173, 176; see also determinism federal theology, 339, 361, 364–5

516

INDEX

Feeling of Absolute Dependence, 35, 46, 478; see also Schleiermacher, Friedrich Feuerbach, Ludwig, 27, 58, 70, 100, 418, 419–23, 425–6, 429; The Essence of Christianity, 27, 419, 420; Thoughts on Death and Immortality, 419 Feuerborn, 253 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 7, 28, 32, 35–6, 39, 55n.3, 59, 171–2, 174, 177, 184n.38, 415; Wissenschaftslehre, 28 fideism, 188 Finney, Albert, 350 Finney, Charles, 242, 323; Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 242 Florensky, P. A., 232 Fogazzaro, Antonio: Il Santo, 504n.44 Forsyth, Peter T., 114, 270, 283, 367–8, 372 Foster, Frank H., 235 France, 157, 396, 399, 403; Catholicism, 188, 408, 492, 502n.27; French Modernism, 488; French Revolution, 4, 76, 110, 166, 189, 201, 206–7, 281, 369, 370–1, 376, 400; French Romanticism, 344, 401, 404, 408; French utopian socialism, 424; Third Republic, 489 Frank, Franz Herrmann Reinhold, 264–6; System der christlichen Gewissheit, 264; System der christlichen Wahrheit, 264 Frank, Manfred, 40, 56 nn 6, 9 Franzelin, Johannes Baptist, 193, 386, 390 freedom, 165, 178, 194, 204, 221, 223, 227–8, 231, 317n.57, 329, 333, 408, 421–2, 442–5; of the church, 204–7; of citizens, 205; of God, 195, 197–8, 310–11; human freedom, 4, 8, 20–1, 77–9, 84, 114, 158, 207–8, 241, 310, 317, 382, 425, 459; of the nation-state 198; and necessity, 310; of the press, 492 Freemasons, 327 free will, 8, 62, 159, 168–9, 215, 224, 242, 340, 350, 379 Frend, William, 400 Freud, Sigmund, 433nn.61, 65 Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 456

Fuller, Andrew, 240, 243 Fundamentalism, 236, 245, 248, 326, 333, 349, 395–6 Gaupp, K. F.: Die Union, 253, Gaussen, Louis: Theopneustia, 236 Geddes, Alexander, 400 Geist, 71, 197, 472, 479, 481; see also Spirit George, J. F. L., 456 German Enlightenment, 167, 171 German historicism, 243, 246–7 German Idealism, 183, 221, 340, 415 German philosophy, 5, 243–4, 370, 371 German rationalism, 457 German Romanticism, 100, 165–81, 183 German Transcendentalism, 91n.5 Germany, 114, 142, 145–6, 157, 174, 204–5, 207, 254, 260, 268, 272–3, 307, 322–3, 326–7, 329, 332, 345, 359, 367, 399, 402–3, 408, 414, 434–55, 458–60, 462–3, 465, 468–85, 494; King Frederick William III of Prussia, 327; King Friedrich I of Württemberg, 187, 189; German Reformed Church, 320, 331–3; Lutheran-Reformed union, 315n.3, 327; Protestantism, 189, 468–85; Roman Catholicism, 187–213, 380, 384, 390, 469; state(s), 4, 201, 203; see also Catholic Tübingen School Gesenius, W., 456, 466 Gess, Wolfgang Friedrich, 262–3, 266; Christi Person und Werk, 262; Die Lehre von der Person Christi, 262 Gieseler, Johann Carl Ludwig, 303 Gladden, Washington, 349, 350–3; Applied Christianity, 352; Being a Christian, 350–1; Burning Questions, 349 Gladstone, William, 88, 90 glossolalia, 363 gnosticism, 207, 344, 436 God, 82–6, 309–11, 342, 350, 364, 386, 405, 408, 425–6, 429, 442, 468, 474, 480–1, 489, 501; Absolute Being, 348;

INDEX

Absolute personality, 306–7, 310, 312, 443; attributes, 52–3, 255–8, 260–2, 267–8, 271–3, 309–10, 314, 420; in Christ, 348, 351, 361, 366, 420, 444–5; as Creator, 15, 133, 149–50, 196, 314, 351, 370, 447; doctrine of, 81, 83, 168, 285, 287, 290, 295, 309, 314, 341, 361; essence, 255, 257, 261, 266, 272; existence, 17–18, 382, 385, 388, 412, 419, 429, 497–8; as Father, 246, 248, 251, 256, 259–60, 266–7, 306, 311, 341, 362, 372, 440, 472, 474–6, 480, 483n.26, 495; freedom, 74n.12, 195, 197–8, 310–11, 386; in history, 296, 442, 448, 459; human relation to, 46, 97, 112, 261, 270, 283–4, 309, 387, 438; immanence, 150, 170, 176–7, 179, 181–2, 196, 247, 256, 258, 282–4, 295; immediacy, 383; immutability, 252, 266; knowledge of, 63, 72, 226, 239, 256, 286, 290–1, 295, 303, 309, 321, 348, 365, 367, 382–3, 386, 388, 390, 444, 488, 506n.85; love, 228–9, 306, 364–7, 420, 443–4, 476; personal, 143, 148, 165–6, 169–73, 182, 208, 255, 443, 475, 479; presence in history/world, 196, 281, 284, 289, 290–1; self-revelation, 192, 306, 308–9, 312–13, 351, 435, 444–5; as (Incarnate) Son, 195, 252, 256, 259–60, 265–7, 306, 311, 362; as Spirit, 195, 256, 259, 266, 281, 306, 311, 362; transcendence, 114, 173, 177, 179, 182, 196, 282, 343, 414; Trinitarian/triune, 13, 53–4, 196, 259, 266, 306, 309–12, 348, 362; and world/creation, 165, 196, 215, 274, 283, 290, 306, 309, 314, 364, 497, 500, 508n.100 Godet, Frédéric, 263; Commentary on the Gospel of St John, 269 Godwin, William, 400 Goethe, J. W. Von, 168, 181, 360; “Prometheus,” 168 Gogarten, Friedrich, 448–9, 481 Gogol, Nikolai, 228, 234n.8 Goldschmidt, Meir Aaron, 101

517

Goode, William: The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice, 244 Goodwin, C. W., 463 Gore, Charles, 269–70, 280, 282–3, 288–296, 298n.24; Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation, 270, 289 Gorsky, Theophilact, 214 Gospels, 44, 83, 86, 191, 306, 417, 460; historical biblical criticism, xii, 69, 252, 351, 480, 496; John, xii, 33, 41–2, 44–5, 92n.16, 94n.48, 216, 263, 283, 436, 457, 460, 466; Luke, 33, 457; Mark, 41, 457, 460; Matthew, 404, 457, 460; Synoptics, 41, 457, 460 grace, 8, 51–2, 65, 74n.12, 114, 361, 364, 366, 371; and freedom, 442–3; and nature, 378–9, 382, 385–90 Graf, K. H., 462 Gramberg, C.P.W., 456 Gratz, Peter Alois, 189 Gray, Asa, 350 Gray, Thomas, 401 Greek Orthodoxy, 473, 475 Green, J. H., 90 Green, T. H., 70–1; Prolegomena to Ethics, 159 Gregory XVI, Pope, 492, 504n.46 Greßmann, Hugo, 434 Grétillat, Augustin, 263 Grundtvig, Nikolai Frederik Severin, 99 Gunkel, Hermann, 434–7; Creation and Chaos, 462 Günther, Anton, 191, 385–6; Preparatory School of Speculative Theology, 459 Gunton, Colin, xiii. 81 Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, Thomasine, 110 Hackmann, Heinrich, 434 Haeckel, Ernst, 142 Hagenbach, Karl Rudolf, 305 Hahn, Georg Ludwig, 263 Hall, F. J., 270 Hamann, J. G., 7 Hare, Julius, 400, 458 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 354n.35 Hazlitt, William, 90

518

INDEX

heaven, 290 Hebrew scriptures, 322, 404; see also Jewish Scriptures; Old Testament Hecker, Isaac, 344 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xi–xii, 7, 35–9, 58–75, 89–90, 93n.36, 100, 143, 190–3, 195, 197–8, 207, 243, 304, 308, 314–15n.4, 355n.45, 360, 413–14, 417–18, 421, 456–8, 472, 478; criticism of Kant, 28, 59–60, 71; dialectical method, 60–6, 65, 67–8, 192; Encyclopedia, 197; Geist/Spirit, 62, 64, 68; God, 60, 62–4, 68; history, xii, 59, 61, 65, 68, 478; Idealism, 59–62; incarnation, 59, 64, 69, 414; Jesus, 65; Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 58, 65–6, 197; mediation, 304–5; Phenomenology of Spirit, 66, 197; reconciliation, 59, 63–4; Science of Logic, 60, 70; sublation (Aufhebung), 62, 74n.8; Trinity, 64–5, 414 Hegelianism, xii, 69–73, 90, 100, 102, 104, 191–2, 253, 268, 280, 282, 284, 295, 304, 331, 333, 421, 424–5, 435, 440, 466; left wing, 65, 69–70, 354n.31, 413, 418–23, 469; right wing, 65, 69–70, 414 Heiberg, J. L., 100 Heidegger, Martin, 114 Heidelberg Catechism, 332, 369 Heitmüller, Wilhelm, 434, 436 hell, 246, 290, 413, 416 Hengstenberg, E.W., 458, 459, 466; Christology of the Old Testament, 458 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 166–7, 172–6, 192, 399–400; God: Some Conversations, 168, 172 hermeneutics, 38–42, 49, 80–1, 189, 191–3, 200, 228, 358, 404, 408 Hermes, Georg, 191, 385 Herrmann, Wilhelm, 147–8, 157, 160–1 nn.16, 17, 439, 444, 468–9, 476, 479, 481; Metaphysics in Theology, 147; Religion in Relation to Knowledge of the World and Morality, 147, 157 heterodoxy, xii, 192, 200, 270, 285, 361, 377, 493, 497

Hick, John, 296; The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 297n.4 Hinduism, 243, 377 Hinrichs, F. W., 69 Hirscher, Johann Baptist (von), 187–9, 191, 194–5, 199, 201–2, 204–5, 208, 212 nn.30, 35, 385; Die christliche Moral, 204 historical biblical criticism, 225, 247, 252, 285, 302, 304, 350, 404, 455, 471, 490, 495, 499, 504n.47, 505–6n.75 historical Christianity, 232, 304, 306, 323, 343, 417, 437, 477 historical Jesus, see Jesus Christ: historical Historical Jesus, Quest of, 480 historical method, 438 historical positivism, 477 historical relativism, 188, 428, 441 historical theology, 48, 50 historicism, 243–4, 246–7, 331, 449, 470–1, 496, 498 history, 59, 84, 169, 194, 320, 334, 347, 414, 448–9, 457, 496; as accidental, 184n.9, 192; biblical, 151, 302, 459; of Christianity, 190, 192, 208, 302, 308, 334, 427, 434–54; of the Church, 49, 54–5, 127–8, 190, 217, 225, 308, 464, 472, 482n.14, 496; of consciousness, 151; of doctrine, 190, 235, 253, 323, 329, 332, 496; of dogma, 225, 436, 472; fact(s), 347, 500; and faith, xii, 495, 499; of God, 54–5, 288, 296; New Testament/ Gospels, 86, 288, 435; particularity, 86, 109, 343, 345; philosophy of, 75n.5, 440, 448–9; progress/ development, 71, 194, 232, 239, 247, 252, 268, 291, 333, 351–2, 429, 438, 446–8, 458; of religion, 420, 436; and revelation, 69, 382, 435, 442, 477; and Scripture, 59; and theology, 495; see also Providence history of religion, 66, 151, 310, 456, 462–3, 476 History of Religion School, 434–54, 469, 478

INDEX

Hitzig, Ferdinand, 461 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 12 Hodge, A. A., 326 Hodge, Charles, 145, 153–5, 162nn.37, 39, 241, 320–6, 330–1, 333, 335nn.9, 10, 350, 356n.86; Systematic Theology, 153, 322, 350; What is Darwinism?, 153 Hölderlin, 58 Holl, Karl, 474 Holland, Henry Scott, 292–3 Holy Ghost, see Holy Spirit Holy Spirit, 197–8, 237, 288, 297, 317n.56, 373, 386, 389–90, 435–6; and the Church, 64, 195, 197, 199, 203, 205, 219; doctrine of, 196–7; and the individual, 195, 197, 199–200, 205, 208, 309; sanctification, 390; and Scripture, 89, 397; Trinity, 64–5, 256, 306, 311 Homer, 407, 429; Illiad, 428 Hope-Scott, James, 491 Hope-Scott, Josephine, see Ward, Josephine Hope-Scott Hope-Scott, Victoria Howard, 491 Hopkins, Evan, 245 Hopkins, Samuel, 240, 323 Horne, Thomas Hartwell: Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, 236, 461 Hort, F. J. A., 90, 466 Howard, Victoria, see Hope-Scott, Victoria Howard Hughes, Hugh Price, 248 human nature/humanity, 108, 254, 259, 264–5, 270–1, 285, 291, 295, 312, 362, 387–8, 414, 419–21, 441, 446, 459, 480; divine humanity, 419, 430, 442–3; freedom, 158, 198, 208; identity, 372; progress, 446–8; religiosity, 198, 208, 345, 419–20 human rights, 62; Geneva Conventions (1864), 22; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 22; United Nations Convention against Torture (1984), 23; see also civil rights humanism, 379–80

519

Hume, David, 5, 7, 14, 16, 143, 149, 171, 239, 494 Hutcheson, Francis, 321 Huvelin, Henri, 500 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 122, 141–2, 158–9 Ibsen, Henrik, 114, 414 idealism, 32, 39, 59–62, 71–2, 75n.29, 31, 159, 172, 177–9, 183, 184n.38, 189, 191, 252, 280, 290, 295, 304, 321, 323–4, 331, 340, 343–4, 383–4, 415, 419, 422, 438, 499 see also British Idealism; German Idealism; Hegel/Hegelianism ideology, 350, 369, 371, 422 Ignatius, St, 222–4; Ascetic Experiences, 222; The Study of Monasticism, 223; A Word about Death, 222 Ilarion, Archimandrite, 232 Illingworth, John, 287 imagination, 178 imago dei/image of God, 23–4, 215, 217, 220–2, 224, 230, 251, 265, 388; likeness, 151, 217, 220, 230; imago trinitas, 198 immanence, 79, 108, 150–2, 173, 176–7, 181, 196, 247, 262, 267, 272, 282–4, 296, 488, 497–8; see also God: immanence incarnation, 78, 86, 94n.48, 109, 112, 114, 151, 195–7, 200, 209n.16, 215, 228, 231–2, 237, 252, 257, 259–61, 263–4, 266–9, 271, 273, 281–8, 290–6, 330–1, 340, 343, 348, 360, 362, 368, 382, 385, 395, 420; Hegel, 59, 64, 69, 414 India, 239, 243, 289, 354n.24, 417 individual(ity), 95n.64, 111, 114, 199, 203, 237, 291, 331, 342, 403, 421, 435, 447, 457, 463, 471–2, 475–7, 479–81, 499, 501 individualism, 151, 221, 286, 291, 323, 346, 371, 422, 469–70, 478 inductive method, 149, 154 Irenaeus, 267, 437 Irons, W. J., 129 irony, 395–402

520

INDEX

Irving, Edward, 90, 244–6, 358–64, 370–3 Islam, 65, 377, 399; in Christian theology, 50, 67, 206, 444 Italy, 376, 380, 502n.27, 504n.47 Iverach, James, 159 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 28, 63, 78, 166–178, 181, 423; On the Doctrine of Spinoza, 168, 172; Open Letter to Fichte, 172 Japan, 403 Jaspers, Karl, 114 Jesuits, 379–82, 384 Jesus Christ, 24, 44, 230, 309, 342–3, 351–2, 364, 367, 373, 401, 404–5, 417, 433n.60, 435, 439, 457, 459, 463, 466, 473, 475, 479–81, 495, 499, 501, 505n.74; ascension/ exaltation, 254–5, 272, 291, 312, 328; atonement, 43, 231, 362, 366, 456, 459; birth, 290, 294, 352, 457; the Christ, 102, 196, 463; and the church, 200; (self-) consciousness, 44, 252, 263, 273, 313, 421, 463, 480–1, 496; cross/crucifixion, 147, 215, 217, 229, 237, 283, 290, 296, 364, 368; death, 44–5, 64, 196, 215, 218, 229, 231, 233n.7, 283, 286, 350, 362, 368, 443, 456, 459, 463; divine/human unity, 305–6, 309–10, 312–13, 361–2, 388, 425, 480; divinity, 217, 251–79, 347–9, 362, 437, 457, 463; empty tomb, 290; eschatology, 351; God consciousness, 481; historical, xii, 65, 86, 109, 143, 147, 252, 257, 282–3, 291, 295, 308, 310, 351–2, 444–5, 472, 479; of History/Christ of Faith, 269, 305–6, 352, 445, 479, 496; humanity, 251–74, 285, 289, 306, 312, 348, 361–3, 459, 473, 480; incarnation, 59, 64, 78, 83, 112, 196, 199, 229, 274, 331, 362, 395; inner life of, 479, 481; life of, 191, 199, 304, 457, 460, 484n.42; Logos, 72, 78–80, 82, 84, 89, 92n.16, 94n.43, 251, 253, 309, 312–13; as Lord, 83, 359; love, 227, 421; mediator, 305–6; as Messiah,

193, 196, 419, 437, 456, 458; as metaphor, 347, 349; miracles, 196, 303, 419; mission, 248, 463; as moral teacher/example, 232, 303, 463, 480; moral teachings,193, 195, 345; of Nazareth, 43, 83, 109, 193, 252, 302, 313, 480; obedience, 22, 229, 480; parables, 397–8; paradigm/perfection, 112, 312, 348; Passion, 286; person, 252, 271–2, 283, 307, 312, 330, 477–8, 481; person and work, 44, 52, 147, 194, 230, 237, 264, 268, 284, 310, 328; personality, 269, 306, 313, 444–5; presence, 43–5, 65, 78; psychology, 273; reconciliation, 229, 345, 367; Redeemer, 38, 43–7, 49, 258, 260, 267, 270, 306, 308, 444–5, 480; resurrection, 45, 64, 196, 228, 290, 294, 352, 437, 456; revelation, 147, 270, 304, 306, 308–9, 348, 351, 444–5; sacrifice, 196, 217, 231, 237, 456, 459, 480; salvation, 194, 215, 228–9, 284, 302, 328, 364, savior, 257, 302, 345, 361–2, 365, 368; second coming, 194, 239, 245, 398, 463; and Socrates, 102; Son of God/ God the Son, 64–5, 78, 193, 196, 198, 233n.7, 237, 259–61, 272, 274, 282, 286, 297, 361–2, 476, 480; Son of Man, 463; suffering, 253, 296, 365; temptation, 267; transformation, 43–4; uniqueness, 343, 479–81; work, 364, 367–8; see also Christology; incarnation; Logos Jewish Christianity, 460 Jewish Scriptures, 302; see also Hebrew scriptures; Old Testament Johannes Climacus, see Kierkegaard, Søren Johannes de silentio, see Kierkegaard, Søren John of Damascus, 93n.41 Jonas, Ludwig, 35, 55nn.4, 5 Jones, Henry, 71 Jowett, Benjamin, 124, 464 Judaism, 65–6, 252, 377, 397, 399, 456, 465–6, 471, 495; anti-Semitism, 433n.64; in Christian theology, 45, 50,

INDEX

66–7, 74n.16, 193, 398, 405, 444, 457, 471; Jewish apocalyptic, 463; Jewish emancipation, 189; in Western thought, 427–8, 430n.2 Judge William, see Kierkegaard, Søren judgement: human, 11, 15, 25–6; Last Judgement, 194, 217 Jung, Carl, 433n.61 justification, 195, 198, 215, 217, 220, 229, 233n.1, 309, 328, 331; by faith, 121, 123, 215, 221, 248, 307; through works, 221; see also sola fide Kafka, Franz, 114 Kaftan, Julius, 439, 469, 476–7, 479 Kähler, Martin, 434 Kahnis, Karl Friedrich August, 266–7 Kant, Immanuel, xi, xii, 3–30, 35, 59–62, 71, 77–9, 84, 91n.5, 143, 146, 166, 171, 174, 178, 183, 184n.38, 192, 243, 302–3, 323, 340–1, 343–4, 355n.45, 389n.39, 402, 408, 413, 415, 431n.3; aesthetic philosophy, 7, 25–7; categorical imperative, 8, 21–3; “Copernican Revolution,” 6, 37; Critique of Judgement, 4, 25, 27, 402; Critique of Practical Reason, 4, 20, 25, 78; Critique of Pure Reason, 3–4, 11–12, 15, 17, 25, 36, 157, 169; epistemology, 3, 5, 8, 13–14, 16–17; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4, 20–1, 23, 25; ideas of reason, 12; Jesus, 24; metaphysics, 11–12, 14; Metaphysics of Morals, 4, 20, 25; moral reasoning, 4, 8, 20–2, 60, 77; noumena and phenomena, 4, 7, 14–17, 59–60, 77, 408; practical philosophy, 7–8, 20–5, 77; radical evil, 4, 23; Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason/within the Limits of Reason Alone, 4, 10, 20, 23–4, 78, 94n.57; theoretical philosophy, 7, 11–19; transcendental idealism, 6, 171–2; transcendental philosophy, 14; transcendental realism, 5; What is Enlightenment?, 9 Kantianism, 71, 147–8, 172, 174, 340, 382, 389, 441, 456 Katansky, A. L., 226

521

Kayser, A., 462 Keble, John, 131 Keil, C. F., 459 Kempijsky, Thomas: Imitation of God, 223 Kempis, Thomas à, 414 kenotic theology, 230, 251–79, 289, 295, 311–12, 314, 317nn.66, 68 Kerr, Fergus: Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 486 Keswick Convention, 245–6 Khomyakov, Alexei S., 221–222; Experiencing the Recitation of the Catechism, 222 Kierkegaard, Michael Pederen, 99–100 Kierkegaard, Peter Christian, 100 Kierkegaard, Søren, xi, 58, 70, 73, 90, 97–118, 367, 396, 414, 430, 430n.2; Ane Sørendatter Lund, 99; AntiClimacus, 98, 109, 112; The Book on Adler, 111; Christian Discourses, 111; Concept of Anxiety, 104–6, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, 102; Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 98, 101–2, 105–7, 109–10, 112–13; Constantin Constantius, 103–4; despair, 102–3, 108, 112; Either/Or, 98, 102–4, 107; existentialism, 98–9, 107–8, 113; faith, 105, 109, 112; Fear and Trembling, 103–5; God-relationship, 104–6, 108, 112; guilt, 106, 108; Johannes Climacus, 98, 102, 104–5, 107–9, 112; Johannes de silentio, 103–4; Judge for Yourself, 112; Judge William, 103–4, 106–8; love, 103, 111; From the Papers of One Still Living, 102; Philosophical Fragments, 104–5, 109, 112; Point of View, 99; Practice in Christianity, 109, 112; Regine Olsen, 100–1, 104; Repetition, 103–4; revelation, 111; self, 97, 106, 109–13; For Self-Examination, 112; Sickness unto Death, 112; sin subjectivity, 107, 109; Stages on Life’s Way, 101, 106–7; truth, 107; Two Ages, 110; Two EthicalReligious Treatises, 111; Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 111; Victor

522

INDEX

Kierkegaard, Søren (Cont’d) Emerita, 98; Vigilius Haufniensis, 104, 106; Works of Love, 111 Kingdom of God, 193–9, 202–6, 209n.16, 227, 230, 349, 351–2, 385–6, 463, 475–6, 478 Kingsley, Charles, 130, 286 Kireevsky, Ivan Vasilievich, 221–2, 234n.8 Kleutgen, Joseph, 188, 191, 381–2, 384–90, 393nn.32, 41; Die Philosophie der Vorzeit, 384; see also Vatican Council I knowledge, 3, 32, 36, 48, 50, 78, 97, 128, 145–7, 157, 177, 190, 218, 220–1, 251, 258, 270, 304–5, 308–10, 383–4, 388, 441, 459, 480; biblical, 123; and faith, 305, 309; and history, 496–7, of God, 63, 72, 226, 239, 256, 286, 290–1, 295, 303, 309, 321, 348, 365, 367, 382–3, 386, 388, 390, 444, 488, 506n.85; natural/ immediate knowledge of God, 214, 383, 388, 390, 438, 488; revealed knowledge of God, 214, 295, 395; of natural sciences, 280, 302; see also epistemology König, J. L., 253 Koran, see Qu’ran Krauth, Charles Porterfield, 320, 329–30, 334, 337n.29, n.30, 345; The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology, 355n.42 Kronshtadsky, Father John: My Life in Christ, 232 Kuenen, A., 462, 464–5; The Religion of Israel, 465; Historisch-kritisch onderzoek, 465 Kuhn, Johannes, 191, 193, 195, 199 Kuhn, Thomas: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 160 Küng, Hans, 377–8 Kustermann, Abraham Peter, 190 Kuyper, Abraham, 359, 368–71 Laberthonnière, Lucien, 490, 497 Lachmann, Karl, 460 Lacordaire, Henri-Dominique, 492 Le Roy, Edouard, 490, 497

Leibniz, Gottfried, 5, 12–16, 18, 28, 33, 56n.12, 61, 168, 171, 225, 302; Monadologie, 36 Lemius, Joseph, 487 Leo XII, Pope: Testem benevolentiae nostrae, 502n.26 Leo XIII, Pope, 119, 145, 191, 375, 377, 380–1, 389–91, 392n.5, 486, 496; Aeterni Patris, 188, 191, 375–6, 379–82, 384, 486; Divinum Illud Munus, 390 Leontyev, Konstantin, 226–7, 234n.8 Lepidi, Alberto, 381 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 89, 168–72, 176, 191–2, 399–400, 464; On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, 109; The Education of the Human Race, 399; Lessing’s ditch, 170, 184n.9, 472 Levitov, P., 232 liberal theology, 230, 280, 282–3, 289, 294, 296, 298n.24, 301, 305, 463, 468–85 liberalism, 207, 235, 246, 331, 340, 349–53, 356n.86, 359, 372 liberation theology, 293 Liberatore, Matteo, 381–4 Liddon, Henry P., 283, 289–90 Liebner, Karl Theodor Albert, 258–60, 272, 306–7, 311, 316n.31; Die christliche Dogmatik aus dem christologischen Princip dargestellt, 258 Lightfoot, J. B., 466 Lindbeck, George, 56n.11 Litton, E. A.: The Church of Christ, 244 Livingstone, David: Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, 243 Locke, John, 5, 14–15, 302, 340; The Reasonableness of Christianity, 9 logic, 60–1, 83–4, 307, 310–12, 321 logical positivism, 160 logocentrism, 114 Logos, 72, 78–80, 82, 84, 89, 92n.16, 94n.43, 251, 253–74, 281, 283, 285, 287, 291, 309, 312–13, 349, 356n.70, 368, 439, Loisy, Alfred, 488, 490, 495–9, 504n.47, n.54, 507n.93; Autour d’un petit livre,

INDEX

496; L’Évangile et l’Église, 495–6; Simples réflexions, 488 London Missionary Society, 243, 245 Lopatinsky, Theophilact, 233n.1 Lord’s Supper, 329, 332; see also Eucharist; Holy Communion; Sacraments Lotze, R. H., 146 love, 194, 204, 227, 258, 311, 314, 420–2, 426, 447; of God/neighbor, 111, 194, 223; attribute of God, 52, 228–9, 420 Lowth, Robert, 396–402, 404, 409n.16; Lectures on The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 396–400; New Translation of Isaiah, 398 Lücke, Friedrich, 303–4, 306, 316n.30 Ludlow, John Malcolm, 286 Lund, Ane Sørendatter, 99 Lupton, Charlotte, 465 Luthardt, Christoph Ernst, 267 Luther, Martin, 268, 302, 330, 435, 474 Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, 320, 326–30, 333, 334 Lutheran Confessions, 327–8, 355n.43 Lutheran theology, 51, 215, 260, 264, 268, 312, 400, 438, 474; confessional, 326–30, 473; of the Eucharist, 63, 65, 345 Lutheranism, xiii, 31, 55n.1, 169, 187, 197, 253, 307, 319–20, 332, 334, 345, 355n.43, 441, 468, 481 Lyttleton, Arthur, 288 Mackay, Robert William: The Tübingen School and Its Antecedents, 269 Mackintosh, H. R., 114, 270, 364, 367–8 Madison, James, 321 Maine de Biran, François-Pierre, 157 Makarius, Archimandrite (Glukharyov), 218, 233n.6 Makarius, Archimandrite (Mikhail Petrovich Bulgakov), 219, 221–2, 232–3n.6; An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, 219–20; Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 219. Malègue, Joseph, 503n.42

523

Malinovsky, N.P.: On the Saviour-God: A Dogmatic Essay, 230 Manichaeism, 85, 207 Mann, Thomas, 396 Marcel, Gabriel, 114 Marheineke, Philip K., 70, 191–2, 197, 303, 315n.4, n.9, 414, 431n.19 Marsh, Herbert, 400 Martensen, Hans Lassen, 100, 102, 312 Martindale, C. C., 492 Martineau, Harriet, 90 Marx, Karl, xii, 58, 70, 100, 414, 418, 422–3, 426; The German Ideology, 422 Marxism, 281, 410n.29, 418, 429 materialism, 143, 156–8, 169–70, 172–3, 176, 224–5, 340, 421, 425, 499 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 88–9, 280, 282–7, 291–3, 298n.15, n.17, 400, 402–3, 460; Kingship of Christ, 285; Theological Essays, 461 Mayers, Walter, 120 McCosh, James, 155–6; The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral, 155 McIlvaine, Bishop Charles, 241 mediating theology, 280–300, 301–18, 339–57, mediation theology, 301–5, 314n.2, 315n.4 Mendelssohn, Moses, 166, 168; Morgenstunden, or Lectures on the Existence of God, 168 Mercersburg Theology, 320, 330–4, 345 Mercier, Désiré, 381 metaphor, 346–7, 349, 355n.61, n.64, n.65 metaphysics, 11, 14, 53, 78–9, 81, 87, 169, 176, 241, 243, 258, 262, 273, 283, 289, 295, 304, 341, 345, 347–8, 356n.75, 367, 377, 382–6, 388–9, 413, 417, 426, 429, 440, 445; and epistemology, 37–8, 343, 379 Methodism, 235, 237, 241–2, 245–6, 248, 319, 327, 350 Michaelis, Johann David, 399–400; Introduction to the New Testament, 400 Mill, John Stuart, 90, 158, 424

524

INDEX

Milton, John, 80 miracle, 418, 437, 439 mission, 201, 238–43; and culture, 243; evangelical, 238; of Jesus, 248; overseas, 243, 245–6; of the Roman Catholic Church, 188, 205, 238 missionaries, 235, 239 Mitchell, H. G., 248 Mivart, St George Jackson, 156 Mö, Johann Adam, 187–8, 191–2, 195–7, 199–202, 205–7, 211n.15, n.40, 389; Athanasius der Grosse und die Kirche deiner Zeit, 200; Die Einheit in der Kirche, 195, 205; Symbolik, 195, 200, 205–6 Mobberly, R. C., 287, 372 Møller, P. L., 101 Møller, Poul, 100 monarchy, 95n.77, 203, 205, 208, 285; see also Britain: monarchy monophysitism, 197; see also christology: two natures Moody, Dwight L., 248 Moore, Aubrey, 150, 159 Moore, G. E., 72 Moravian tradition, 99 More, Henry, 83 Mormonism, 319 Müller, George, 246 Murray, John Courtney, 377–8 Mylne, James, 364 Mynster, J. P., 99, 101, 111 mystery, 383, 391, 405 mysticism, 178–81, 215–16, 222–3, 225, 323, 331, 381, 388, 408–9, 429, 436, 438, 443, 475, 498–501, 507n.97 myth(ology), 345, 399, 405, 417–19, 448, 456–7 Napoleon, 189, 201, 456, 489 nation, 87–8, 95n.77, 204, 288, 321, 347; see also nation-state National Church, 87 nationalism, 202–3, 209 nation-state, 87, 198, 201; see also nation-state Natorp, Paul, 72

natural science, 141–64 natural selection, 155–6; see also Darwinism natural theology/religion, 122, 131–5, 214, 247, 303, 321, 382–3 nature and grace, 378–9, 382, 385–9 Nazism, 428 Neander, Augustus, 192 Neander, Johann August, 192, 331, 333 Nechaev, Sergei, 424–5, 432n.54 neo-Hegelianism, 466 neo-Kantianism, 72, 147, 157, 160, 479 Neo-Protestantism, 339, 343, 345–9, 351 Neo-Scholasticism, 375–94, 486–7, 489, 497 neo-Thomism, 375–94 Nesmelov, Victor Ivanovich: The Science of Man, 231 Nesmy, Jean, 503n.42 Netherlands, The, 368–9, 462, 464; King William I of Orange, 369 Nevin, John Williamson, 320, 323–4, 330–4, 337n.32, 345; The Mystical Presence, 345 New Age religion, 354n.38 New Divinity, 240, 243, 246, 323 New England Transcendentalists, 323; New England Theology, 339; see also American Transcendentalism New Evangelicalism, 367 New Haven Theology, 323 New Religious Mind school, 231 New School Presbyterianism, 334 New Testament, 44–5, 196, 216, 251–2, 288, 295, 302–3, 306, 367–8, 397–8, 400, 404, 419, 434–5, 456–8, 460, 462–3, 466, 471, 474, 495; Acts of the Apostles, 460; Corinthians I & II, 460; Galatians, 460; James, 123; Philippians, 251, 289; Romans, 460 New Testament studies, 33, 41, 43, 189; see also biblical exegesis Newman, F. W., 460, 464–5; A History of the Hebrew Monarchy, 460 Newman, Francis, 130 Newman, John Henry, xi, 89, 119–138, 145, 244, 332, 491, 494, 496–7;

INDEX

adequacy of scripture, 122–3, 128, 134; anti-evangelical polemic, 122–5, 132–3, 136n.24; Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 119, 121–2, 126–7, 130, 133, 494; The Arians of the Fourth Century, 128; Catholic Church, 125, 127; Church of England, 119, 125, 127; The Church of the Fathers, 121; “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” 129–30; Conversion to Roman Catholicism, 119, 127; ecclesiastical perfection, 124–31, 134; An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 127–9, 268, 496; Grammar of Assent, 133–4, 269; Idea of a University, 132, 145; Lectures on Justification, 121; Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 121, 125; on Protestantism, 121–3, 125, 127, 136n.17; on R oman Catholicism, 119–20, 122, 125, 127, 130–1, 133, 136n.20; skeptical method, 122–4, 127–9; Tract 85: Lectures on the Scriptural Proof of the Doctrines of the Church, 121–4; Tract 90: Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles, 126–7, 129, 130; The Tractarians, 120–3, 125; via media, 121, 125; see also Anglicanism; Oxford Movement; Tractarians Niebuhr, B. G.: History of Rome, 458 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 350, 449 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 350 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xii, 414, 418, 426–30; Ecce Homo, 427, 433n.60; The Genealogy of Morals, 427, 429; Untimely Observations, 433n.59; The Will to Power, 428 nihilism, 166, 169, 171–2, 176, 184n.12, 413–14, 423–6 Nitzsch, Carl Immanuel, 303, 306, 316n.27 Nöldeke, T., 462 non-Christians, 238 Nonconformity, see England: Nonconformity Novalis, 167, 179–82 novel, the, 402–9

525

objectivity/objective truth, 114, 129, 147, 231, 308–9, 328, 383, 415–16, 420–1 O’Donovan, Gerald, 503n.42 Oehlenschläger, Adam, 99 Old Catholic Church, 459 Old Testament, 45, 67, 216, 219, 224, 397–8, 404, 419, 435, 437, 456–66, 474, 495; Chronicles I & II, 456, 460–1; Daniel, 461, 463; Deuteronomy, 247, 455, 460, 462; Exodus, 464; Genesis, 24, 103–4, 144, 152–3, 399, 404, 406–7, 456, 460–4; Isaiah, 401, 404, 457, 459, 461, 463; Job, 401; Joshua, 461; Judges, 461; Kings I & II, 456, 462; Moses, 401, 456–7, 461, 463; Numbers, 456, 462, 464; Pentateuch, 457, 460–5; Psalms, 396–7; Samuel I & II, 397–8, 456, 460, 462, 464; Zechariah, 463; see also Bible Olsen, Regine, see Kirekegaard, Søren ontological argument, 17–18 ontology, 283, 288, 313, 330, 343, 382–3, 387, 391, 480; and epistemology, 14, 302 Optina Pustyn Monastery, 233, 233n.7 Origen, 83, 85, 94n.41 Ørsted, Hans Christian, 99 Orthodox Church, 359; see also Greek Orthodoxy; Russian Orthodoxy Osiander, 253 Ottley, R. L., 466 Owen, John, 361–2 Owen, Richard, 155–6 Oxford Movement, 235, 244, 287, 289; see also Anglicanism; Newman, John Henry; Tractarians Paine, Thomas: The Age of Reason, 400 Paley, William, 131, 143, 148, 155, 239, 403; Natural Theology, 143 Palmer, Walter & Phoebe, 245 panentheism, 165, 314, 447 pantheism, 59, 69, 79, 133, 143, 152, 165–86, 197, 207, 313, 316n.21, 317n.57, 324, 443–4, 446–9, 488, 497

526

INDEX

papacy, 489; authority, 199–201, 204, 212n.40, 382, 487, 497; infallibility, 376, 487, 489 Papal State, 489 Park, Edwards A., 240, 323 Parker, Theodore, 324, 461; A Critical and Historical Introduction, 461 particularity/the particular, 85–6; and universality, 295, 471 Pascal, Blaise, 414 Passaglia, Carlo, 193, 386 Paul V, Pope, 379, Paul, St, 45, 251, 262, 294, 343, 376, 436–7, 443, 460, 499; see also New Testament Pavlovsky, Archpriest G. P., 219 Pecci, Gioacchino, 380–1; see also Leo XIII, Pope Pecci, Giuseppe, 380–1 Peel, Robert, 360 pelgianism, 324 Pentecost, 64 Pentecostal tradition, 363, 373; see also charismatic tradition Perfectionism, 32 Perkins, William: The Art of Prophesying, 409n.13 Perrone, Giovanni, 193, 386 Perry, Bishop Charles, 241 person: human, 81, 198, 207, 264, 271, 283; individual, 85; and religion, 198; see also individual(ity) personalism, 182, 350, 444 personality, 72, 79, 170, 207, 252, 269, 308, 310, 313, 420, 443–8, 488; of God, 255–6, 264–5, 310–13, 420 Pétau, Denis, see Petavius, Dionysius Petavius, Dionysius, 386, 389 Perthes, Friedrich Christoph, 315n.11 Peter the Grave, 218, 224: Orthodox Confession, 218–19 Petre, Maude, 491, 499 Petrov, N.V., 232 Pfleiderer, Otto, 235 Phalkovsky, Irinej, 214 phenomenology of religion/faith, 191–3, 308 philanthropism, 238

Philaret (Gumilyovsky), Archbishop, 225–6, 230; Historical Teachings of the Church Fathers, 225; Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 225; Talks on the Suffering of our God, Jesus the Christ, 230 Philaret (Vassily Mikhailovich Drozdov), Metropolitan, 216–17, 222, 224, 233n.3; Catechism, 216–18; Dialogue between a Believer and a Sceptic on the True Doctrine, 217; On Dogmatic Dignity, 224 Philo, 78, 92n.16, n.17 Photy, Archimandrite, 216 Pietism, 35, 42–3, 46, 253, 301–2, 332, 435, 455–6, 465 Pius IX, Pope, 375, 377, 382–3, 489, 492; Syllabus of Errors, 375, 382, 492 Pius X, Pope, 377, 391, 486–7, 489, 496, 503n.34; Doctrine of the Modernists (Pascendi Dominici Gregis), 391, 486–90, 496–8, 505–6n.75; Lamentabili sane exitu, 391; On the Sacrorum antistitum, 391 Pius XII, Pope: Humani Generis, 391 Planck, Gottlieb Jakob, 192 Plato, 32, 41, 61, 81, 83, 85, 95n.63, 106, 174–5, 181, 379, 401; The Cave, 78–9, 86 Platon, Metropolitan, 214–15, 215, 233n.8 Platonism, 83–4, 90, 91n.5, 176, 180, 282, 304, 378, 395, 443, 498 Plotinus, 74n.5, 85, 95n.62 pluralism, 115, 119, 319, 389, 395, 403, 449, 469, 473, 478 pneumatology, 196–7, 200, 209, 388–9; see also Holy Spirit Poland, 233n.7 Ponomaryov, P. P., 232 Pope, Alexander, 401 positivism, 414; scientific, 156–9 postmodernism, 114, 314 Powell, Baden, 148–9, 161n.18; The Connection of Natural and Divine Truth, 149 Powell, H. C.: The Principle of the Incarnation, 270 preaching, 45, 120, 248, 328, 354n.28, 363

INDEX

predestination, 218, 240–1, 379, 443 Presbyterianism, 145, 153, 235, 239–42, 248, 320–6, 330–1, 334, 335n.6, 341, 350, 364, 366, 368, 371, 466 Pre-Raphaelite movement, 246 Priestly, Joseph, 400 Princeton Theology, 153, 241, 320–6, 329–31, 333, 335n.7, 351, 355n.43, 371 Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 75n.29 Process Theology, 160, 314 progressivism, 151–2 Prokopovich, Theophan, 214–15, 220–1; On God’s Unbearable Yoke, 233n.1 Protasov, Count Nikolai A., 218–20, 223 Protestant theology, 52–3, 160, 198, 314, 377, 436; on Roman Catholicism, 322–3, 332 Protestantism, xii, 121–3, 125, 127, 197, 204–7, 219, 235–6, 238, 244, 302, 307, 319–20, 332–3, 347, 353n.6, 355n.43, 369, 379, 400, 402, 408, 435, 443, 470, 473, 475, 488, 494–6 providence, 51, 144, 149, 155, 194, 215, 310, 314, 351, 399, 401, 472, 475; doctrine of, 85, 196 psychology, 141, 158–9, 224–5, 252, 269, 273, 295, 324, 331, 353n.1, 391, 413, 477–8, Puritanism, 238, 241, 330–1, 334 Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 244, 400, 457, 465; Puseyites, 244, 332 Quakers, 321 Quest of the Historical Jesus, 480, 484n.42; see also Schweitzer, A. Qu’ran, 414 Rade, Martin, 468–70, 474, 481 Rahlfs, Alfred, 434 Rahner, Karl, 209, 377–8, 389, 498, 500–1, 506n.87, 508n.105 rationalism, 5–6, 11, 16, 60, 63, 169, 171, 188–9, 191–2, 196, 198, 201, 207, 221, 225, 302, 304–5, 316n.21, 323, 327, 387, 393n.39, 418–19, 456–7, 459, 469

527

rationality, 9, 191, 246, 303, 322, 343, 367, 415, 471, 487 Ratzinger, Joseph, 209 Rauch, Friedrich, 331 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 350 Ravaisson, Jean, 157 Ray, John, 131 realism, 40, 75n.31, 154, 171–2, 174, 176–8, 180–1, 321, 323, 382–3, 404, 447 reality, 50, 101, 173, 283, 290, 295, 308, 324, 384, 415, 420–2, 437, 443, 501; of Christ’s humanity, 251; of God, 283, 333, 348, 498; of the Trinity, 348 reason, 10–12, 77–8, 87, 105, 175, 177, 239, 242, 296, 303, 319, 342–3, 383, 389, 419–20, 449, 489, 497; and aesthetics, 26–7; and faith, 105, 172, 175, 198, 302–3, 305, 309, 321, 375–94; and revelation, 59, 302, 305, 375–95; and scripture, 11, 89, 405; and truth, 84, 109, 219–20; and understanding, 16–17, 77, 92n.27, 343 redemption, 43, 46, 51–3, 55, 134, 151–2, 217, 223, 230–2, 236–7, 240, 257, 264, 306, 309, 379, 442, 444–6, 459, 479, 480 Reformation, Protestant, 4, 68, 121, 130, 197, 202–3, 235, 319, 326, 329–33, 379, 395, 408, 435, 465 Reformed theology, xiii, 260, 262, 323, 330, 353n.5, 358–74, 409n.13; of the Eucharist, 63, 199 Reformed tradition, 31, 55n.1, 190, 197, 199, 240–1, 269, 283, 310, 319–20, 322, 329, 331–2, 339, 341, 345, 358–74 regeneration, 237 Reid, Thomas, 321, 364; see also Common Sense philosophy (Scottish) Reiff, Friedrich, 263 Reimarus, S. Hermann, 89, 399–400, 464 Reimer, Georg, 35 Reinhart, Rudolf, 190 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 28, 174; Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, 28

528

INDEX

Reitzenstein, Richard, 434 relativism, 440–1 religion, 355n.44, 395, 421, 423, 436, 439, 477–9; aesthetics, 177; comparative, 474, 478; criticism of, 421–30; and culture, 43, 344, 354n.37, 436; human capacity for, 345, 419–20, 478; and revelation, 134, 183, 395; and science, 305, 309; and society, 11, 64, 436, 449; truthclaims, 351; world religions, 399; see also human: religiosity repentance, 223 Resichle, Max, 439 resurrection, 45, 64, 196, 228, 290, 294, 352, 437, 456 Reuss, E., 462 revelation, xi, 48, 54, 74n.12, 83, 111, 132, 134–5, 190, 193–4, 216, 218–19, 221, 270, 295, 306, 309–10, 348–9, 435, 442, 445, 474, 496–7, 505n.71; Bible/Scripture, 124, 131, 135, 144, 154, 219–20, 303, 321–2, 358, 474; through the church/ tradition, 135, 200, 219–20; and faith, 198, 302, 375–94; and history, 69, 382, 435, 442, 477; knowledge of God, 214; miracles, xi, 135, 143, 390, 418, 437, 439; natural, 218, 321–2, 387; and nature, 146, 149, 154–5, 239; and reason, 58, 68, 302, 305, 375–95; and religion, 134, 183, 395; special/ positive, 322, 387, 474; see also God: self-revelation revival, 235–6, 242, 331, 340, 345, 349, 350; revivalist theology, 301, 320, 322, 324, 328, 330, 332, 334, 350–1 Richard of Paris, Cardinal, 496 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 114 Rippon, John, 237 Ritschl, Albrecht, 146–7, 161n.15, 273, 301, 314n.3, 367, 434–5, 439, 463, 468–9, 472, 474–6, 480, 482n.14; Instruction in the Christian Religion, 474; Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion, 314n.3 Ritschlian theology/Ritschlianism, 145, 148, 268, 273, 367, 439

ritualism, 244, 280 Roman Catholic theology, xiii, 52, 187–213, 273–4, 351, 375–94; Eucharist, 63, 330 Roman Catholicism, 119–20, 122, 125, 127–8, 130–1, 141, 179, 187–213, 244, 322, 332–3, 339, 341, 344, 354n.39, 359, 441, 459, 470, 473, 475; emancipation in England, 119; mission, 238, 344; Modernism, xii, 158, 486–508; and Protestantism, 197–8, 202, 204–7, 344; reform, 188, 190–1, 194, 201, 208–9; tradition, 199, 244 Romanes, Georges: Mental Evolution in Man, 159 “Romanism”, 327, 329, 331 Romanticism, 76–9, 100, 165–86, 189, 191–2, 206, 221–3, 243–8, 268, 323–4, 330–1, 340–5, 360, 389–90, 395–6, 401–2, 408, 417; see also England: Romanticism; France: French Romanticism; German Romanticism Rose, H. J., 457 Roselli, Salvatore, 380 Rosenkranz, Karl, 414, 431n.19 Rothe, Richard, 301, 469 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 62 Russell, Bertrand, 72 Russia, 214–34, 254, 414; Alexander I, 218; emigration, 232; Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna; 233n.4; Nicholas I, 219, 223; Peter the Great, 219; Russian nihilism, 423–6 Russian Orthodoxy, 214–34, 273, 473, 475; ascetic monastic tradition, 214, 221–4, 227, 232, 233n.8; Bible translation, 216–17, 223–4; ecclesiology, 217; existentialist movement, 231; the Fall, 215, 217, 220, 222–3, 231; Holy Scripture, 214–16, 218–20, 224–5; Holy Tradition, 214–16, 218–20, 222, 225; imago dei, 215, 217, 220–2, 224, 230; on Protestantism, 217, 219, 221; on Roman Catholicism, 217, 221, 222–3; Russian Bible Association, 216–18; sacraments, 215, 230; “secular”

INDEX

theology, 214, 220–2, 226–8; Slavophiles, 220–2, 226–7, 234n.8; theology of the academy, 214, 218–20, 222–3, 228–32 sacrament(s), 120–1, 123, 195, 215, 218, 227, 230, 232, 233n.7, 237, 291, 309, 328, 330–2, 436, 490–1, 496, 499, 501 sacramental theology, 197, 199, 200–1, 209, 244, 323, 329–30 sacramentality, 8, 382 sacrifice, 43, 231, 286, 288, 347, 456, 459, 464; see also atonement; Jesus Christ Sailor, Johann Michael, 191 Saint-Hilaire, Geoffrey, 149, 156 Saint Thomas, John of, 379 salvation, 86, 123, 215–16, 227, 230–1, 233n.1, 240, 242, 255, 283, 302, 30–10, 333, 340, 356n.73, 362–4, 371, 417, 442, 444, 447, 459; assurance of, 238–9, 242, 359, 361, 364–6; economy of, 194, 196, 229; Jesus, 194, 215, 228–9, 284, 302, 328, 364; particular, 240; personal, 237–8; suffering, 229; universal, 231, 246; see also soteriology Salvation Army, 247 Samarin, Yuri F., 221 sanctification, 198, 215, 220, 229, 232, 238, 242, 245, 263, 359, 362, 386–7, 390 Sanday, William, 504n.54 Sanseverino, Gaetano, 380 Sarto, Cardinal, 496; see also Pius X, Pope Sartorius, Ernst. W. C., 253, 311 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 114, 377–8, 430 satisfaction, 217, 221, 229, 230, 233n.7, 286, 350, 366, 480 Scandinavian theology, 254, 284 Schaff, Philip, 320, 332–4, 337n.38, n.39, 345; The Creeds of Christendom, 333; History of the Christian Church, 333; Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 333; A Select Library of the Nicene and Ante-Nicene

529

Fathers, 333; What is Church History?, 355n.41 Scheeben, Matthias Joseph, 386–90, 393n.37, n.41; Nature and Grace, 389, 393n.41, n.44 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (von), 32, 55n.3, 58–9, 92n.26, 93n.36, 101, 183, 190, 192–4, 252–3, 355n.45, 458 Schenkel, Daniel, 469 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 209 Schiller, Friedrich, 183 Schlegel, A. W., 174, 183 Schlegel, Friedrich, 167, 174–7, 179–82, 185n.40, 396 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xi–xii, 7, 31–57, 62–3, 68–9, 79, 89, 114, 165–7, 176–82, 190–2, 197, 199, 301, 303–4, 306–7, 309, 314, 315n.4, n.9, n.10, 316n.29, n.30, 323, 341, 343–6, 348, 350, 352, 355n.44, n.45, 360, 408, 413, 438, 442, 445, 469, 477–8, 480–2; Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, 43, 47–8, 50; The Christian Faith, 31–2, 35, 37–8, 40, 43, 46, 49–54, 55n.1, 199, 304, 306, 310, 478; christology, 43–6, 306; Dialektik, 35–9, 50, 55n.5; Feeling of Absolute Dependence, 35, 46, 478; Foundations for a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory, 33; hermeneutics, 38–42; Hermeneutics and Criticism, 9, 33, 39–40; on history, 40, 48; immediate/religious self-consciousness, 51, 52, 306, 474; Lectures on Dialectic, 55n.5; Life of Jesus, 43–4; Pietism, 35, 42–3; on Plato, 174; On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 33, 42, 46, 174, 182, 185n.57, 304, 323, 469; Romanticism, 165–7, 176–9; Sämmtliche Werke, 55n.5; on Spinoza, 174, 178; systematic theology, 37 Schleiermacher, Gottlieb, 43 Schmidt, C. B., 399 Schmucker, Samuel S., 329–30, 332, 355n.44 Schneckenburger, Matthias, 255

530

INDEX

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 415–18, 426, 429, 431n.17; The World as Will and Representation, 416 Schrader, Clemens, 193, 386 Schwartz, Karl Heinrich Wilhelm, 314n.2 Schweitzer, A., 463, 480, 484n.42, 505n.74; The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 480, 484n.42 science: and religion, 122, 305; and theology, 141–64; see also Darwinism scientism, 430 Scotland, 70, 239, 283, 321, 359, 466; Church of, 359, 363–6; Established Church, 71, 244; Free Church, 247, 366–7, 465; Presbyterianism 239, 242–3, 372; Roman Catholicism, 400; see also Common Sense philosophy (Scottish) Scott, Sir Walter, 244, 403, 491 Scottish Common Sense philosophy, see Common Sense philosophy (Scottish) Scripture, 9, 83, 128, 192, 247, 251, 260, 269, 273, 304, 309, 322–3, 326, 328, 350, 358, 364, 480, 495, 497–8; authority, 122, 220, 236, 244, 308, 322, 326, 367–8; authorship, 269; as basis for doctrine, 214–16, 236, 262–3, 322, 385; canon, 123; as historical record, 304, 308; historical veracity, 69, 326, 497; inerrancy, 326, 328, 495; infallibility, 71; inspiration, 123, 219, 236, 248, 288, 395, 495; interpretation, 328, 395–411; literal sense, 325, 398; as myth, 196; primacy, 358; revelation, 322; and reason, 11, 319; self-verifying, 495; and tradition, 214, 218–20, 224–6, 231, 244, 385; Word of God, 309, 470; see also Bible; biblical exegesis Sectarianism, 141, 199, 327, 332 secularization, 202, 370, 476 self, 86, 97, 110–13, 147, 172, 180–1, 223, 225, 230, 271, 283, 414 self-consciousness, 170, 177, 255, 262, 271, 309, 311, 313, 314, 389 Semler, Johann Salomo, 469–70; Of the Free Examination of the Canon, 470–1 Septuagint, 216, 219, 224

Seraphim, Metropolitan, 216 Sergius (Stargorodsky), Archimandrite, 230, 231; The Orthodox Teaching of Salvation, 230 Shaftsbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, (Third Earl of), 173, 176 Shaftsbury, Lord, 238 Shakespeare, William, 175, 181, 396, 399, 403, 407, 410n.30 Sharp, John, 399 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 400–1, 413–14; Defence of Poetry, 401; “Queen Mab,” 413 Shishkov, Aleksandr S., 216 Sibbern, F. C., 100 Silvestr, Archimandrite, 226; Dogmatics, 226, 230 Simeon, Charles, 236, 241 Simon, Richard, 396, 400 simulacrum, 217, 220; see also imago dei: likeness sin, 104–5, 109, 112, 134–5, 193–5, 198, 218, 220, 224, 227, 230–2, 233n.7, 236–8, 241, 287, 291, 310, 322, 347, 362–3, 366, 368, 428, 445, 459, 475, 479, 481; and Fall, 65, 223, 236; forgiveness, 215; original, 106, 198, 323–4, 353n.1, 417, 445; punishment, 285, 365; redemption, 151–2, 236; repentance, 365; victory over, 283, 286 skepticism, 7, 11, 122–4, 127–31, 135, 157, 169, 171, 239, 290, 295, 412–33, 499 Skinner, J., 466 slavery, 61, 206–8, 238, 324–5, 334, 347 Slavophiles, 220–2, 226–7, 234n.8 Smart, Christopher, 401 Smith, George Adam, 367 Smith, John Pye, 239 Smith, William Robertson, 247, 465; The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 465 social gospel, 247–8, 339–57; see also Evangelicalism: social gospel socialism, 203, 207, 281, 285, 291, 294, 353 society, 62, 151, 201, 207, 346, 352, 355n.48, 422–3, 428, 476–7, 486,

INDEX

491; bourgeois, 110, 112, 179, 469–70; and church, 112, 203, 470, 501; and the individual, 291; kingdom of God, 194, 463; and theology, 414; welfare, 71 Socinianism, 230, 233n.7 sociology, 141, 439, 449 Socrates, 102, 104, 396 sola fide, 197 sola gratia, 366 sola scriptura, 121, 197 Solovyov, Vladimir, 226–8, 232, 234n.8; The Justification of the Good, 227; Lectures on Divine Humanity, 227; The Spiritual Basis of Life, 227 Sordi, Domenico, 381 Sordi, Serafino, 380–1 soteriology, 236, 285, 296, 306, 323, 372; and christology, 283; see also salvation soul, 12, 14–15, 17, 220, 223, 237, 242, 261, 263, 271, 340, 343, 346, 351–2, 385, 416, 440, 444, 472, 479 Spain, 403 speculative theology/speculation, 301, 303–4, 306, 315n.4, 321, 323, 345–6, 348, 350, 385–6, 419, 448, 459, 472, 478, 481, 482n.14 Spencer, Herbert, 133; The Principles of Psychology, 269 Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 13, 15, 27, 79, 166–78, 180–1, 183, 302; Ethics, 28; Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 9 Spinozism/Neo-Spinozism, 166–76, 180–2 Spirit, 71, 148, 200, 224–5, 252, 263, 343, 346, 352, 362, 435, 438, 443, 447, 472, 501; see also Geist; Holy Spirit Spurgeon, Charles Haddon, 248 Stanley, A. P.: The History of the Jewish Church, 464 state, 87, 202–7, 294, 324, 326, 352, 369–71, 470, 492; see also nation, nation-state Staudenmaier, Franz Anton, 187–8, 190–2, 195–9, 201–2, 206–8, 210n.12, 213n.43; Die christliche

531

Dogmatik, 195, 258, 261; Geist der göttlichen Offenbarung, 195 Steinmeyer, Karl Ludwig, 268 Stephan, Martin, 327 Stephen, Leslie, 122 Sterling, John, 400 Sterne, Laurence, 396, 408 Stirling, James Hutchison: The Secret of Hegel, 70 Stirner, Max, 418, 421–4, 426; The Ego and its Own, 421–2 Stone, Darwell, 270 Storr, Gottlob Christian, 303 Strauss, David Friedrich, 44, 56n.17, 57n.20, 58, 69–70, 143, 191, 193, 196, 252, 306, 312, 323, 414, 418–19, 457–8, 460, 469, 472, 477, 481, 482n.7; The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History, 44, 57n.20; Glaubenslehre, 252, 419; The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 69, 89, 143, 196, 252, 261, 269, 306, 418–19, 457–8; The Old Faith and the New, 143, 412 Strindberg, August, 114 Stubenrauch, Katharina-Maria, 43 Suárez, Francisco, 381, 384 subjectivity/subjectivism, 37, 40, 51, 109, 114, 132, 147, 165, 181, 203, 206, 226, 231, 283, 309, 328, 389, 408, 421, 441, 443, 497 sublime, the, 25–7, 401, 456 suffering, 288, 296 Sullivan, William L., 502n.26; The Priest, 503n.42 supranaturalism, 302–3, 305 Svetlov, Pavel Y., 229, 231; The Meaning of the Cross in the Matter of Christ, 229 Switzerland, 254, 269, 332, 390, 424, 456, 469 symbol(ism), 80, 290, 294, 323–4, 329, 346, 488 system(s), 81, 215, 324 systematic theology, 37, 48, 115, 215, 241, 307, 309, 347, 382, 438–49, 475 Talamo, Salvatore, 380 Taparelli, Luigi, 381

532

INDEX

Tareev, Mikhail, 230, 273; The Disparagement of our God, Jesus the Christ, 230; The Foundations of Christianity, 230 Taylor, Charles, 65, 67 Taylor, James Hudson, 246 Taylor, Nathaniel William, 242, 323 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 160 telos/teleology, 143, 148, 153, 155–6, 259 Temperance movement, 238 Temple, Bishop Frederick, 149–51, 294; The Relations between Religion and Science, 149 Temple, William, 88, 273, 280, 282–3, 288, 293–7, 299n.42, n.49; Christus Veritas, 295; The Church and the Labour Party, 294 Ternovsky, Archpriest P., 218 Thackeray, William, 407 theism, 122, 152–4, 157–9, 167, 172–4, 178, 182, 239, 429, 447, 478 theodicy, 133, 145, 391 Theodore, Archimandrite, see Bukharev, Aleksandr theology of crisis, 481 theology and science, 141–64 Theology of the Word, 469 Theophan the Recluse, St, 224, 227, 231; An Outline of Christian Moral Teaching, 224 Thirlwall, Connop, 458 Thirty-Nine Articles, 125; see also England, Church of Tholuck, Friedrich August Gottreu, 301, 323, 333 Thomassin, Louis, 386 Thomasius, Gottfried, 253–4, 255–8, 260, 262, 264, 266–8, 270, 272, 317n.66; Ein Betrag zur kirchlichen Christologie, 254, 261; Christi Person und Werk, 255, 257 Thomism, 82, 375–94, 486–7; see also Aquinas, St Thomas Thoreau, Henry David, 183 Thornwell, James Henley, 324–6, 336n.16, n.17 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 99 Thummius, 253 Tieck, Ludwig, 174

Tillich, Paul, 114, 185n.51 time, 108, 173; and eternity, 86, 108–9, 252 Toland, John, 167–9, 183n.2; Indifference in Disputes: A Letter from a Pantheist to an Orthodox Friend, 183n.2; Pantheisticion, 183n.2 Tolstoy, Leo, 226–8, 232, 234n.8 Torrance, James B., 365, 372 Torrance, Thomas F., 372 Tractarians, 120–3, 125–6, 283, 287, 289, 400, 491; Tracts for the Times, 120; see also Newman, John Henry Tracy, David, 209 tradition, 216, 222, 333, 358–9; and Scripture, 214, 218–20, 224–6, 231 transcendence, 158, 172, 177–8, 288, 333, 344, 500 transcendental idealism, 172, 194, 343; see also Kant, Immanuel Transcendentalism, see American Transcendentalists; German Transcendentalism Transcendentalist Club, 340–1 Trimmer, Mrs, 406 trinitarian theology, 73, 208–9, 347, 356n.70, 414 Trinity, 13, 45, 52–4, 58–9, 67, 69, 94n.41, 123, 195–8, 217, 253–6, 258–60, 264, 266, 272, 284–6, 295–6, 306, 310, 312–14, 340, 347–8, 360, 362, 385, 490; Athanasian Creed, 95n.62; Coleridge, 82–6, 93n.40; community, 285; economic, 314, 348; generation and procession, 263; Hegel, 58–9, 64–5; hypostases, 258–9, 264–5, 310–12; immanent, 251–79, 306, 309, 314, 348; subordinationism, 266, 272–3; persons, 348–9, 356n.70; perichoresis, 197, 312 Troeltsch, Ernst, 434, 438–49, 468–9, 475, 478–9, 481–2; Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 442; Social Teaching, 449 Trollope, Anthony, 407 Tuberovsky, Archpriest A., 232 Tübingen School of Catholic Theology, 187–213, 385–6, 389, 469

INDEX

Tuch, Friedrich, 461 Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons, 423 Turner, J. M. W., 243 Turretin, Francois: Intitutio theologiae elencticae, 322 Twesten, August, 306, 316n.29 typology (biblical), 396, 398, 404–6 Tyrrell, George, 487, 490–1, 495–6, 498–501, 505n.74, 507n.93, n.97, n.100, 508n.105; Christianity at the Crossroads, 501; Faith of the Millions, 507n.97; Hard Sayings, 507n.97; Lex Orandi, 507n.100 Ullmann, Carl, 303, 305–6; The Essence of Christianity, 316n.27 ultramonatism, 376 Umbreit, Friedrich Wilhelm Carl, 303 Unaltered Augsburg Comfession, 320 understanding, 12; and reason, 16–17, 77, 84, 92n.27 Unitarianism, 129, 158, 235, 284–5, 319, 323, 340–1, 348, 353n.6, 361, 400, 458, 460, 465 United States of America, 151, 203, 245, 248, 270, 319–38, 339–57, 359, 371–2, 400, 455, 466, 469, 489, 493, 502n.26, 503n.40; abolitionist movement, 324, 347, 349; American South, 238–9, 241, 324–6; Baptists, 238, 241, 319–20, 327; Civil War, 324–6, 334, 339, 347, 349; Congregationalism, 240, 242, 246, 320, 334; Constitution, 324, 346; Episcopalianism, 321; Evangelicalism, 235, 240, 349; Fundamentalism, 236, 245, 248, 326, 333, 349, 395–6; immigration, 326, 336n.23, 339, 344–6, 354n.39; Liberalism, 350, 371; Lutheranism, 319–20, 326–30, 332, 334, 345, 355n.43; Methodism, 319–20, 327, 350; Mormonism, 319; Native Americans, 243; Presbyterianism, 242, 320–7, 330–2, 334, 335n.6, 341, 371, 466; Puritanism, 339; Quakers, 321; Revolution/War of Independence, 4, 319, 354n.35; Roman Catholicism,

533

339, 341, 344, 354n.39, 489; slavery, 324–5, 347, 349; Transcendentalism, 90, 183, 323, 339–57, 340, 348; Unitarianism, 340–1, 348, 353n.6, 461; Universalism, 319, 341; see also Hodge, Charles; Princeton Theology Universalism, 246, 319, 341 university, 32–3, 36, 194, 205–6 Utilitarianism, 414, 425, 442 utopian socialism, 425; see also France: French utopian socialism value judgements, 146; see also Ritschl, Albrecht van Prinsterer, Groen, 369 Vatican Council I, 188, 375–6, 383, 390, 492, 496; Dei Filius, 375, 383, 390 Vatican Council II, 209, 377, 380, 388, 391, 494 Vatke, Wilhelm, 456–8, 461, 464; Biblische Theologie, 456 Venn, Henry, 243 Victor Emerita, see Kierkegaard, Søren Vidler, Alex: A Variety of Catholic Modernists, 491 Vigilius Haufniensis, see Kierkegaard, Søren Vilmar, August Friedrich Christian, 268 Virgin birth, 290, 294, 457 virtue, 20, 23 Vishnetsky, M., 232 Volney, C. F., 399–400; Ruins of Empires, 399; Voyages en Syrie et en Egypt, 399–400 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 198, 209, 274, 390, 393n.47; Herrlichkeit, 390; My Work: In Retrospect, 393n.47 von Bohlen, P., 456 von Harnack, Adolf, 440, 463, 468–70, 472–7, 478–81, 483n.26, 495–6; Das Wesen des Christentums, 495; History of Dogma, 473 von Hase, Karl August, 315–16n.21 von Hofmann, J. C. K., 253, 267, 459 von Hügel, Friedrich, 490, 492–3, 497, 499–501, 504n.54, 506n.80, 507n.93, 507n.97; The Mystical Element of Religion, 499

534

INDEX

von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 32, 55n.3, 193 von Oettingen, Alexander: Lutherische Dogmatik, 268 von Rat, Gerhard, 407 von Stählin, Adolf, 268 Wagner, Richard, 418 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 156 Walther, Carl F. W., 320, 326–30, 333–4, 336n.23, n.26 war, 61–2 Ward, Mrs Humphrey: Robert Elsmere, 503n.40 Ward, James: Naturalism and Agnosticism, 158–9 Ward, Josephine Hope-Scott, 491–3, 499, 503n.40, 507n.93; Out of Due Time, 491–4, 504n.44, 504n.51, 507n.93 Ward, Maisie, 491, 499, 503n.43, 507n.93 Ward, Wilfred, 490–1, 496, 499, 503n.43 Ward, William George, 491 Warfield, Benjamin Breckinridge, 326, 333 Warnock, Geoffrey, 72 Wegscheider, Julius August Ludwig, 302, 315n.10; Dogmatics, 303 Welch, Claude, 318 Weinel, Heinrich, 434 Weiss, Johannes, 434, 463, 476; Jesus’s Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 463 Wellhausen, Julius, 407, 455, 457, 460–2, 465, 482n.7; History of Israel, 461–2, 465 Wernle, Paul, 434 Wesley, Charles, 242 Wesley, John, 239, 241–2 Westcott, Bruce F., 293, 466 Westminster Catechism, 322, 324, 326, Westminster Confession, 322–4, 326, 361, 364 Weston, Frank: One Christ, 270 Whewell, William, 149 White, Andrew Dickson, 141–2; A History of the Warfare of Science with Christendom, 141, 152

Whitehead, Alfred North, 160 will, 8, 62, 72, 79, 82, 85, 157–8, 215, 220, 224, 228, 242, 255, 271, 295, 324, 362, 415–17, 420, 425–6, 428, 436, 442; of God, 82–4, 150–1, 170, 204, 228, 255–6, 266, 286, 310–11, 313–14, 425, 443, 445, 447; of the people, 204; union of wills, 443–4; will-to-power, 429 Williams, Edward, 240 Williams, R., 463 Wiseman, Cardinal, 491 Witherspoon, John, 321 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 72, 148, 160; Philosophical Investigations, 148; Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 148 Wobbermin, Georg, 478 Wolff, Christian, 5, 28, 168, 171, 387, 393n.39; Vernünftige Gedanken (1712–1725), 28 women’s enfranchisement, 349 Word 192, 200, 225, 236, 309, 328, 330, 364, 395, 407, 468, 470, 482; and sacrament, 332; see also Bible; Jesus Christ; Scripture Wordsworth, Dorothy, 80, 182 Wordsworth, William, 79, 80, 84, 86, 182, 243, 245, 401, 403, 408; Lyrical Ballads, 79, 182, 401; “Tintern Abbey,” 80 World Council of Churches, 294 world religions, 66–8 World War I, 288, 349, 448–9, 481 World War II, 288, 296, 372, 481 Wrede, William, 434, 436, 482n.7 Wundt, Wilhelm, 478 Yavorsky, Stephan: The Stone of Belief, 233n.1 Yuvenaly: Christian Theology for the Aspiring Saint, 214 Zigliara, Tommaso, 381 Zöckler, Otto, 152–3, 162n.35 Zola, Emile: Rome, 504n.44 Zoroaster, 400 Zwinglian theology, 330