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Bible Dictionaries
Christ in Modern Thought
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or CHRIST IN MODERN THOUGHT
1. The modern spirit
(1) Its genesis.—The modern spirit manifests its characteristic modes of thought by contrast with the mediaeval age. It carries to their ultimate result the tendencies that produced the Reformation and the Revival of Letters. It has revealed itself in positive and distinctive form only in our own day and after a long process. A brief general statement of the course that process took will serve to indicate at once its legitimacy and the extent to which it was likely to affect ideas of Christ.
In essence and at the outset the gospel appeared as a revolutionary idealism, inverting the old standards of excellence and the old criteria of truth, yet not outwardly revolutionary in its immediate aims. Continuous with this instinct grew up the mediaeval mind. It is a mind which sees its ideals with the vividness of reality and in the same instant confesses the no less insistent reality of the actual, and the impossibility of transforming it as yet by the ideal. It is a mind therefore of compromises and contrasts. Familiar as a summary of the mediaeval spirit at its maturity are these: (a) the contrast between this world and the other world; (b) the contrast between faith and reason, philosophy and theology; (c) the contrast between the secular and the sacred—which three are all aspects of one fundamental antagonism, that, viz., between the natural and the supernatural. The practical consequences of these postulates everywhere penetrated the common life and thought. The 16th cent. awoke to the keenest consciousness of their baleful influence. What characterized that age was its fresh sense of the reality of this life and of nature, and of the interests of both. Baptized anew in mental and spiritual experience, its loftier minds were enabled to initiate those departures from the mediaeval system which were destined to determine the most powerful currents of the modern spirit and which still rule modern thought. Modern thinkers frankly abandon the idea of irreconcilable difference between nature and the supernatural. They acknowledge no revealed thought that is beyond their Judgment, and believe in nothing which is in its nature inexplicable or irrational. They work in a spirit of rational freedom led by the conviction that there are not two worlds but one; that it is one mind that lives in both; that not the spiritual and the natural, but the spiritual in the natural, is the formula alone adequate to represent the truth. The modern spirit differentiates itself from the mediaeval by conceiving the distinction between nature and spirit as one not of separation but of unity. To spiritualize the natural by force of insight into its deeper meaning is the ruling motive, the starting-point being experience—the experience in one life of both realms.
(2) Its characteristic impulses.—Only by a slow and gradual logic has clear self-consciousness of aim been reached. Among the contributory causes four are of special importance: the rise of speculative philosophy; the scientific movement and the application of scientific method in historical and critical research; the growth of socialistic theory; revived interest in the psychological processes that enter into the construction of knowledge.
In speculative thought the new point of view formulates itself in theoretic form under the name of the ‘absolute’ standpoint. Absolute here means that the universe Is wholly knowable. The term does not exclude relativity; it only excludes an unknowable relativity divorced from all the phenomena of being and action. It points to two facts that must never be lost sight of, viz. that the Ultimate Reality is not abstract but the highest concrete, and that it can be reached by confidence in the power of Reason. The idealistic systems of Germany, in spite of their excesses, did magnificent service by their imperishable vindication of both truths. The scientific spirit observes patiently that it may define accurately. It is the spirit which takes nothing on trust, and seeks a reason for everything. It ranges knowledge in diverse spheres according as the facts it studies fall within the perceptions of sense, or manifest themselves in history, or are known in personal emotion and insight. Each science rests on its own proper principles, obtained from a study of its own facts, without reference to ideas drawn from other departments. Only thus is it possible to bring into clear relief the specialities and differentiae of the various kinds of knowledge, and so establish the contribution of each to final truth. The scientific spirit has given birth to modern History and Criticism. Social theory embraces innumerable divergences of opinion, all of which have been influential in directing attention to the social situation and its effects on character. The Socialistic controversy has enormously deepened the feeling of human solidarity. Liberty, we are learning, does not depend on the absence of social pressure. Social power is the organ of personal character. The new psychology is the latest conspicuous intellectual movement of the time. It is the peculiar product of modern philosophy. Kant’s achievement was to reassert against Hume’s scepticism the claims of reason; but also to limit their range; to show that there are elements in the mind which underlie the very possibility of experience, and therefore cannot be derived from it: which elements are beyond the reach of Reason. In effect Kant showed that life is more than knowledge. That persuasion rules the modern world. The key to all problems lies in man; and the key to the nature of man lies not solely in his thought, but mainly in his will. The whole man is seen in man active. There is an enhanced idea of personality. That idea carries with it two others whose significance for religious reconstruction we cannot overestimate. There is (a) the ethical character of man’s experience; his life is the fulfilment of relations with others; (b) the revealing power of his experience; to the whole man in action and passion the inner meaning of things comes nearest.
Under the above mentioned impulses the modern mind has passed through the realms of nature, history, personal experience to a more complete mastery of knowledge. The effort has brought great gain to theology.
(3) Its influence on theological method.—Contemporary theological aims illustrate the direct effect of the foregoing forces in at least four directions: (a) towards a more scientific system of theology; (b) towards a better appreciation of the nature of religious experience; (c) towards insistence on moral personality as the determining principle in theological construction; (d) towards recognition of the ‘social consciousness’ as contributory to theological truth.
‘Scientific’ applied to theology signifies a new method. The motive here is to vindicate for theology a sphere of knowledge of its own, precisely as for any other science; and to assert and defend the right of theology to employ a method peculiar to its own facts, appropriate to its own sphere. The vindication successful, it follows at once that both theology and natural science may pursue each its own independent path, limited only by its own law, yet both moving in real harmony. The antagonism between science and theology vanishes. The vulgar conception of the supernatural, indeed, vanishes too; but simply because the richer idea has taken its place of an inherent Divine Spirit in nature and in man, both of which are moments within the Spirit of the Divine Being. The facts alluded to in the ethical and social constituents of theological truth reveal the partial character of the sources from which in the past doctrinal construction has drawn. They were chiefly two, the intellect of Greece, the polity of Rome. Greek philosophy and Roman jurisprudence, working on the Christian facts, yielded the orthodox formulas. The genius of Northern Europe had later to enter in and infect the conscience of the Church with its own deep feeling. The temper of the present age is its fruit. It offers a wide contrast to the earlier age. It is an age less of intellect than of feeling; it is less objective, precise, actual, but more inward, refined, wistful. Ultimate explanations take with us a touch of what is subjective and personal. Personality is one of the dominant categories of the hour. It is just what may be looked for that theology should seek to interpret its problems in terms of personality. The new method is a radical departure from the old. It begins with religion as actually experienced in personal life, and from that reaches, so far as it can, the thought of God and the nature of Christ; whereas the dogmatic method begins with the thought of God authoritatively given and passes on from that to religion. The new method can never reach belief in any attribute of the Divine Nature which is not involved in religious experience. Merely metaphysical conceptions of Divine truth in terms of ‘substance’ or ‘essence,’ as these are commonly taught, fail to satisfy. A sufficient self-revelation of God can be given only in a full personal life. Fresh grace is discovered in the conscience. What the higher nature of man, his Moral Reason, witnesses to, that is the sure guide to the apprehension of Divine reality and the true foundation of religious feeling. For in that nature man is at his best; there relation to God finds place, His revelation is received and His life shared. With the ethical goes pari passu the social. Society arises where the mutual intercourse of moral spirits is possible. The conviction has grown, in a degree unknown to earlier times, that such intercourse, realized in a true brotherhood of mutual service, may minister untold blessing to men. The ‘social consciousness’ is simply the growing sense of the power, the worth, the obligations of our intercourse with one another. From the intercourse of man with man, the communion of God with man is known. Growth in religious knowledge follows the laws of a deepening friendship.
The working motive here is worthy of special remark. It is that man has discovered within himself the starting-point and the test of religious verity. His deepest assurance comes to him as the outcome of his experience in life, as a person, active and patient, growing stronger as faculty springs up within him at life’s stern challenge. Finite human experience, imperfect though it be, affords real if limited knowledge of the Infinite. And this knowledge is to be gained, not by putting ourselves outside of experience and by way of contrast constructing a Being with qualities diametrically opposed to the human, but rather by seeking to understand experience, and to determine which alone of the qualities and purposes it contains have permanent meaning and worth. The religious transition of the last four centuries has been a slow but continuous passage from the Aristotelian principle, that there is no ‘proportio’ between the finite and the infinite, to the principle first adopted by the Lutheran divines, that the finite is capax infiniti.
2. Modern conceptions of Christ.—Modern conceptions of Christ vary according as one or another of the characteristic forces of the modern spirit predominates. We may range them in a threefold order: (1) the Christ of Speculation or the Ideal Christ, (2) the Christ of Experience or the Ethical Christ, (3) the Jesus of History or the Historical Christ.
(1) The Christ of Speculation.—Each of the transcendental philosophies involved a speculative Christology. The first phase appears in Kant (1724–1804). The work of Kant in religious theory is the work of a pioneer. His equipment was not rich enough in mind or heart for more. Hume, as he tells us, ‘awaked him out of his dogmatic slumber,’ but only in philosophy. In religion he stood in line with the previous age. He shared the unhistorical views of the 18th cent, and its ‘rational’ religion. What of personal religion he knew, he knew intensely, as the class to which he belonged, the poorer citizen class, knows it; but, like that class also, with narrowness. It was a Christianity of heart and will, as practised among the common people, which was real to him. He stood quite outside Christianity in its ecclesiastical or mystical forms. Religious experience of any independent type, except as a department of moral life, he was unconscious of. He had no consciousness of God distinct from the dictates of conscience. Hence, when he came to rationalize his religious experience, the outcome, as was natural, was the simple translation into forms of reflexion of an imperious moral sense. The Kantian position is usually termed Ethical Deism. The extreme deistic view is, that creation is left to itself save for occasional Divine interferences. Kant’s central doctrine is in harmony—asserting ‘the absolute value of the ethical life.’ God having originally created man and endowed him with reason and free will, nothing further is necessary on the Divine side for moral advance or redemption. Each man, as a moral personality, rests entirely on himself, on his own reason and freedom, and may make moral progress quite independently. His moral consciousness is conceived as so absolutely self-sufficient as to have no need of outward aid, whether from Nature, or Society, or God. On this general idea he constructs his conception of Christianity and Christ in his treatise, Religion within the Bounds of mere Reason (1793).
He starts with the perception of conscience of a radical evil dwelling in human nature as an indubitable fact of experience. The return to good prescribed by the moral law can be accomplished only by a thorough revolution of the entire mode of thought which establishes a new character, one susceptible of good, on the basis of which progressive moral improvement is made possible. The means by which this change in man is brought about is that the idea of moral perfection, for which we are destined from the first, is brought to a new life in his consciousness. But in no way can the ideal of a humanity well-pleasing to God be brought home to us more vividly than under the image of a man, who not only himself promotes the good by word and deed, but is also ready for the benefit of the world to endure all sorrows, since we measure the greatness of moral strength by the hindrances to be overcome. In the historical figure of Jesus this ideal appears. Not as though the idea of a humanity well pleasing to God were first invested with power and obligation by means of an example furnished by experience; rather has the idea its reality in itself, since it is founded on our moral reason. Only as an historical exemplar of this eternally true idea can such a figure as that of Jesus be presented to us. In Him the ideal of the good appeared in bodily form. When we believe in Him as the Son of God, the object of our saving faith is this eternal ideal of God-pleasing humanity, not the historical man; the ideal of which the historical man is but the highest representation. Incarnation is the ‘personalization of the Moral Ideal.’ Jesus first declared the moral to be the only saving, and afforded in His life and death an example of it. This exhausts the significance of His Person.
Opposition to Kant’s interpretation of religion as mere ethics and of Christ as a Moral Example, impelled more genial minds like Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, and others to reactionary insistence on the immediacy of the religious consciousness and the speciality of the Christian revelation; but with neither critical nor philosophical depth. The direct succession from Kant appears in Fichte (1762–1814), who was impressed with Kant’s results, started from them as a disciple, and later carried them to further consistency, and in so doing advanced decisively beyond them.
With Fichte, Christ was the first to apprehend the Divine, the first to recognize clearly and embrace freely the Divine will, and hence is the first-begotten of God. The manner of His apprehending was peculiar to Himself. The immediate unity of God and man in the spirit in which religion consists, came to Christ not by speculative philosophy or tradition as it does to us, but simply through His existence. This knowledge was to Him the primary and absolute thing, immediately identical with His self-consciousness. In Him, therefore, it may be said that God became incarnate. Fichte labours under the delusion of conceiving personality as a limit of the Divine nature. That God in becoming man might not annihilate but enhance personality and raise it to its true infinite capacity, had to be discerned. The attempt came with Schelling (1775–1854), whose philosophy is a philosophy of the Incarnation. His problem is determined for him by the conclusions of Fichte. According to the latter, the relation of the subject and object, human and Divine, is a unity of simple identity. But such an identity, it is to be noted, ignores the characteristic differentia of the human, i.e. that in the essence of the human which it is necessary to safeguard in its union with the Divine. The unity with which Christology is particularly concerned, cannot be understood if the two members of the antagonism are not thought out purely by themselves according to their idea. The unity is not a true unity if the members of the antagonism are not united by that which distinguishes and opposes them. Those two considerations, the essential unity of the subject and object, and their unity in the midst of their differences, form Schelling’s contribution to this high debate. Together they yield his doctrine of the Absolute.
Whatever is, nature and spirit, is within the Absolute. It embraces all reality. It is the meeting point,—the neutrum, the ‘indifference point,’—of subject and object, preserving the opposite alongside the negation for each per se. Moreover, it is living, concrete, being by ceaseless self-birth a mobile, willing, creative unity, and on that very ground necessarily a growth or historical process (Werden). In history the Absolute realizos itself. It could not become manifest in itself; to manifest itself it submits to limitations. The manifestation is not in any one form of finite limitation, but in the whole field of history. The finite or the historical is that in which the Absolute has its life: the form in which the Absolute reveals itself. It is thus not merely finite, it contains the Infinite within it; the human holds the Divine. The domain of history is the birthplace of spirit; history itself is the incarnation of God. Everything is explainable by this idea; God in His growth (Werden) or the Son of God. Nature points to Him, and has in Him its final causes; history unfolds the aspects of His life; religion experiences Him as personal freedom from personal evil.
The same idea is the essence of the Christian religion. Christ, in His historical individuality, is not the Son of God: the eternal Son of God is collective humanity, and what is true of collective humanity is not to be limited to Him. The Incarnation is falsely received when received as an isolated fact in time—it was from all eternity, and is not to be interpreted in an empirical way. Christ, however, is in a sense the beginning of this incarnation; since without Him it could not have come to be or he known. In Him God first becomes truly objective. As such He is the archetypal Man, the universal ideal Man. None before Him revealed God in such a manner, and from Him all men since have learned. But He is not the God-man. Of peculiar significance is the description Schelling gives of the manner in which Christ objectifies the ideal or Divine principle immanent in history. At one period he teaches that the Divine can manifest itself only in an endless series of finite forms, in the totality of which its inner essence is to be known. Here there are two points which reveal how far short of the truth of the ancient Creeds such theories fall. In the first place, the finite forms are a mere series of fugitive appearances of the Infinite, into no one of which the Divine veritably enters to abide: they can only signify the Divine. And secondly, so long as it is so the finite forms are essentially equal to each other: they represent a uniform series. On this line of thought the difficulty of appreciating Christ aright is insuperable. In the last and highest form of his philosophy, Schelling set forth a more fruitful estimate of the finite forms which reveal the Divine. He gives them more substance and concrete content. He arranges and organizes them, not in a monotonous series, but in ascending scale according to the measure in which the Divine spirit rises victorious in each. He is thus enabled to point to the uniqueness of Christ, and to place Him at the head of the series. From another direction deepening experience led him to a richer appreciation of Christ’s Person. The power of evil, he came to see, was too vast to be overcome by man alone; the redemption of the personal spirit is necessarily the work of God, and can be effected only by the immediate presence of God in human consciousness and knowledge. The more mightily evil had come forth in personal form, the more necessary was it that spirit should appear in human form as mediator—for ‘only the personal can heal the personal.’ God must become man. In Christ He did thus become man. In the Personality of Christ the Divine spirit is not simply signified, it is actualized. In Him the single personality is regarded as capable of taking up the perfect will of God into itself, and thereby of attaining absolute worth and becoming a true representative instead of a transitory husk of the Divine life. The infinite significance of personality is declared.
In Hegel (1770–1831) speculation reaches its culmination. Possessed of an imperial intellect, he succeeds in constructing a system (Absolute Idealism), with extraordinary skill and infinite detail, which co-ordinates and harmonizes into organic unity the various principles of his predecessors. His indebtedness to Kant and Schelling is real, and to the latter special. In the working out of the Hegelian scheme, logical considerations are determining. The process of human knowledge, with its alternate analysis and synthesis, is the type of the larger process of the universe. All progress is through distinction, and moves through the three steps of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A simple truth, once discovered, is affirmed as if it were the whole. Presently a larger experience forces man to the recognition of its apparent opposite, only to be succeeded later by the reconciliation of both in a higher unity. Given this simple formula, Hegel will build you the universe.
Hegel admits with Schelling the absolute unity of all things and the identity of the subject and object. But while Schelling, in order to explain how everything is derived from this unity, takes his point of departure in the Absolute, Hegel starts from the Idea (German, Idee), and professes by the force of dialectic alone to make all things spring from the Idea. The Idea includes the Absolute (which is the pure idea considered in itself and in an abstract manner), Nature (which is the idea manifested and become object), and Spirit (which is the idea turning back on itself and beholding itself as soul, as society, as God). The whole course of history is the coming to consciousness of the Absolute as Spirit, an august process which culminates in religion. The world of concrete finite experience is not outside of God, but is a moment in His consciousness. History is not un-Divine, but is the manifestation of God, a process within His infinite Spirit. Religion is the function of the human spirit through which the Absolute comes to full self-consciousness, and as such is the synthesis of finite and Infinite. Its highest form is the Christian religion.
In the eternal Idea there is but one Son, who exists in the first place simply for the ‘thinking speculative consciousness,’ but who, in order to be universally accessible, must also exist for the ‘sensuous representative consciousness,’ must be seen to sensible intuition as an historical event. The Idea must realize itself in fact if all men are to be made conscious of it and the unity of Divine and human it stands for. ‘It must become an object in the world. It must appear, and that in the sensuous form appropriate to Spirit, which is the human’ (Phil. [Note: Philistine.] of Religion, English translation p. 336). This is what has happened in Christianity. ‘Christ has appeared; a Man who is God; God who is Man.’ Christianity centres in the historic Christ. ‘The manifestation of God in the flesh took place at a determinate time and in this particular individual.’ In consequence of the Incarnation of God in Christ, man has learned the universal truth that it is eternally and essentially characteristic of God to be and to become man, that God’s true existence is in humanity which is termed His Church, and that man is essentially one with God.
It is unquestionable that the broad effect of such speculation was to evaporate the facts of Christianity, and to substitute a ‘somewhat else’ (ἔτερον εὐαγγέλιον) for the firm truths of a revealed religion. A God personal only in man, such as the Absolute, clearly implies that God is not personal. An ideal relation without personality has been likened to a painted horse which you cannot ride; and when the abstraction of the metaphysician interwoven in the universe is offered to us as the object of Christian belief, one who feels anything of the burdens and problems of life will turn away like Jacobi, little caring to know of a God who made the eye but sees not, the understanding but neither knows nor wills. An Incarnation which maintains a continuous manifestation of God, of which all men are the bearers, which is never complete, and which dismisses Christ’s pre-existence, sinless birth, resurrection, Divine authority and sole mediation, is not only irreconcilable with Scripture statements, but wholly inadequate to the requirements of the Christian consciousness.
But whatever view be taken of the speculative movement as a whole, certain outstanding services to Christological theory cannot be denied it. It has revolutionized the study of Christ’s Person, and in so doing reacted on the whole theological field. By constructing a theory in which the Infinite and the finite, the Divine and the human, are not exclusive of each other, it demonstrated the rationality of the Incarnation. By its discovery of the spiritual principle in Nature, History, Man, as the truth which gives them all their reality and unity, and by the identification of this principle with Incarnation, it showed the naturalness of Christ’s Incarnation. By its insistence on the truth that the organon of religion is not different in kind from that of philosophy, it has, so to speak, rehabilitated the validity of religious facts, the treatment of which with the contemptuous indifference characteristic of the previous age becomes hereafter an unphilosophical dogmatism. It has vastly widened the range and deepened the bases of belief in the Incarnation, and made possible a fresh and thorough investigation, in the way of criticism and understanding, into the data which support that belief.
(2) The Christ of Experience.—The Christian facts and the Christian consciousness assert themselves in the experiential theology initiated by Schleiermacher (1768–1834). As Kant inherited the sturdy conscience of the Lutheran Reform in his ‘categorical imperative,’ so Schleiermacher embodies its religious fervour in his ‘feeling of dependence,’ or experience of God. When Kant describes the essence of religion as the recognition of all our duties as the commands of God, he says the same thing in balder language, in language less mystically attractive, than that of Schleiermacher when he asserts that the essence of the religious life is the sense of utter and all-round dependence on God. From his training among the devout brethren of Herrnhut, and by a natural temperament of warm susceptibility, Schleiermacher was more akin to Schelling than to Kant, who reiterates the essentiality of duty as Kant does, but of duty inspired by something higher than Kant dreamed of. What is this something higher? Schelling had termed it ‘faith,’ ‘fidelity to yourself and God.’
‘By religiosity—the inner power and spirit of religion—I understand not an instinct groping towards the Divine, and not mere emotional devoutness; for God, if He be God, must be the very heart of life, of all thinking and all action, and not a mere object of devout passion or of belief. That is no real knowledge of God where He is merely object; either God is not known at all, or He is at once subject and object of knowledge. He must be at once our very self, our heart of hearts, yet comprehending all other hearts.’ ‘Faith is to be understood in its original sense of a trust and confidence in the Divine.’ Fundamentally this is Schleiermacher’s view, when he bases his thought on ‘experience’ (Reden uber die Religion).
Religion is the element of life whose influence penetrates all other parts of life. Religion is not a knowing; nor an action: it is a feeling. It is not as science, the knowledge of finite things in relation to each other. It is not as philosophy, the knowledge of the nature of the Supreme Cause. It is not as morals, which is rather the full exercise of its impulses in action. It contemplates the universe indeed, but not to discover the relations of its parts; rather to watch it reverently in the representations and acts characteristic of it, and to let itself be seized and filled in childlike passivity by its immediate influences. It is the immediate consciousness of the universal being. ‘Thus to see and find in all that lives and moves, in all becoming and change, in all action and suffering, thus to have and know life itself only in immediate feeling as this being, this is religion.’ Its seat is in the soul. The central quality of the soul or self-consciousness is a certain emotion engendered by the contact of the objective world with the individual; an emotion which is prior to both thought and action, and animates both. It is this emotion which, as the centre of existence and the meeting-point of the individual and the universe, constitutes the religious sphere of man. It is thus not the mystical sense of absorption in the Infinite. Mysticism has always supposed that the experience of God can be reached only by means which are independent of the world and the ordinary experiences of life; it takes the whole world of sensible objects and human interests to be a barrier between the soul and God; the way of perfection consists in escaping from all these until the impassioned soul in its upward flight loses itself in the formless and viewless light of God. Schleiermacher, on the contrary, teaches that the experience of God’s real existence is not something apart from all the human interests of life. It can come through these interests only by deepening them. The roots that join man to God are the same as those that join men to one another and to Nature, only they go deeper. The religious experience, again, is marked by spontaneity. It is in every man with the original impress which his individuality gives it. Its range and variety are infinite. It may be known to us, shining, as it were, through the beauty and glory of the world in which we live. Sometimes in sorrow and suffering it comes as ‘a deeper voice across the storm.’ So, too, it may arise when the presence of something true or beautiful or good uplifts us above ourselves. In short, everything visible and invisible, every part and event of experience, may become an appearance of God, and be a means of grace. Every experience may be a religious experience. A strong current of individuality is characteristic of religion. There is no such thing as an absolute religion. And there is no man without religion. Hence, too, the relation of the founder or teacher of any historic religion to that religion is intimate and necessary; the study of his character indispensable to the true understanding of it and its after growths.
On the basis of these ideas Schleiermacher constructs his view of Christ and the Christian religion (Reden, and Der Christl. Glaube). Here the point of departure is Christian experience and the historic Jesus. For Schleiermacher there is not religion, but simply religions; the historical relationships of the religions he does not know. Every new religion rests upon a new intuition of the universe. Jesus of Nazareth had such an intuition. What was it? The idea of Christianity is stated, in the fifth Rede, to be that the ruin of the finite in its alienation from God is removed: ‘ruin and redemption are in this mode of feeling inseparably bound up with each other, and form the fundamental relations by which its form is determined.’ Christianity makes ‘religion itself the matter of religion.’ Christ discerned in all things the Divine clement. He discerned at the same time an irreligious principle everywhere. And the clearness with which He saw the need and the means of overcoming the unspiritual by the spiritual constitutes what is specific to Him and His faith. What is Divine in Him is not His purity or originality of character; but the ‘splendid clearness with which the idea He had come to represent shaped itself in His soul, the idea that all that is finite needs the help of something higher to be connected with the Deity; and that for the man who is entangled in the finite and particular, salvation is to be sought only in redemption.’ ‘This consciousness of the uniqueness of His knowledge of God and being in God, and of its power to communicate itself and stir up religion, this was the consciousness of His mediatorship and Divinity.’ To those who come to know Christ it does communicate itself with salutary energy, so that they become new creatures: He is the cause of the new life. In this relation He is the ideal type of humanity, and possessed a unique perfection. The proof lies in the existence of the Church, on the one hand, and the inexplicability of His religious consciousness by natural forces. He is perfect in what concerns His religious consciousness; here He was what He was by a primitive communication from God, in virtue of which also He was sinless. Otherwise He was truly man and subject in all respects to the laws of human growth. Divine in a sense, He was not veritably God; had no pre-temporal being, or miraculous birth, or bodily resurrection. He is Divine simply in the unique and perfect satisfaction He supplies to the needs of the believing conscience; and in the unique and perfect manner in which He Himself realized this satisfaction in His Person.
The culminating point of Schleiermacher’s theory is the affirmation of the supernatural consciousness of Christ and the absolute value of His Person. In this regard his influence on subsequent theology has been of rare fruitfulness. From a multitude who own his inspiration, two may be selected as having, in an original manner, corrected and enlarged his principles: Rothe and Ritschl.
Rothe (1799–1867) was probably the most eminent divine of the middle of last century. He maintained throughout his career, amid the strong intellectual and critical currents of that time, in all of which he shared, a personal faith of extreme warmth and tenderness in Christ’s Person. ‘Bear with you the living certainty of the reality of the historical fact Christ, and simply live your human life in the light of that certainty,’ was the ruling motive of his inner life and also of his whole theological work (Theol. Ethik and Dogmatik).
Rothe takes his start with Schleiermacher in the consciousness, the feeling of God which is found therein. In the presonality of man, this, the Divine principle, is at war with the lower or material principle, its contrary spirit. Not until the lower is vanquished is man free or truly himself. Its conquest is the moral task of mankind. The task can be discharged only in a moral progress of two stages, in which the whole nature of the material principle shall make itself felt and be transformed, and in which the whole nature of the spiritual principle shall display itself. The first stage involves the passage of man through sin. In the second, man will reach complete unity with God. The race of Adam is humanity in the first stage; Christ crowns it. In completing its task, He brings with Him a new power, a miraculous force, which serves as the point of departure for a new development of the race. Here the moral evolution is at the same time religious, since the more subordinate the insistence of sin, the more direct the emergence of the spirit of holiness of the new power, the more perfect, i.e., the assimilation to God. The appearance of Christ is due to a creative act. For although the world and man are made by God in an organic oneness, they are not so made that He cannot enter in. In Christ He does thus enter. In Christ He posits a new commencement of humanity; and in order to prepare for it Rothe admits a special revelation in miracle and inspiration. The new power, the advent of Christ, are by supernatural conception. The ministry of Christ was a continuous spiritualization and growing deification; in actualizing the constant conquest of sin, He at the same time unfolds the wealth of the life of God. The living substance of God comes forth in Him. The historical growth of Jesus is the divinization of man at the same time as it is the Incarnation of the Logos; its course is uninterrupted from His birth to the sacrifice of Calvary which marks its last step and its triumphant close. Triumphant, for the Redeemer could not die; face to face with Him, the Holy of God, death had no power. When then His spiritualization is achieved, Jesus lets fall His earthly envelope; and from that hour is truly God. Not that He is to be identified with God the Father. God-man on earth, He remains such in the heavens, liberated from His physical organism, and invested with a body corresponding to His celestial estate. But no material barrier now restrains His power, His Spirit acts without hindrance on the world. The glorified Lord reveals Himself as ‘central individuality,’ i.e. the secret of the increasing triumph of the spiritual principle from age to age. When the totality of His disciples are gathered, the Incarnation will be complete and the creation of the universe closed. At this stage God will live no longer in man only, but in the organism of renewed humanity (‘Auf diesem Punkt ist das Menschsein Gottes zu seinem Menschheitsein,’ Dogm. ii. 179).
Rothe’s is a grandiose conception of Moral Incarnation exhibited with incomparable vigour of thought. Christ is no incarnation of the mythical sort, as in the imagination of India. Nor is He as one of the Heroic age, such as most primitive peoples magnify. He is man truly, yet less individual man than man generic, while at the same time God, the potency that rules the whole world-process. In its cosmical significance the Christian interpretation of Christ has never before received so impressive a statement.
Less original than Schleiermacher or Rothe, Ritschl (1822–1889), taking impulse from both, elaborates a system less speculative, more positive and Scriptural. His, like theirs, is a doctrine of redemption, and rests on experience. He construes his material, however, by a widely divergent method. The critical results of Tübingen had affrighted him with their divorce of the facts of Christ’s life from the idea of His Person. The metaphysical and emotional elements in the idea of Christ’s Person current in the schools around repelled him. Ritschl had a singularly self-conscious and self-reliant character, and at the bar of the rich ethical experience yielded by the inner secrets of conscience his sense of the insufficiency of contemporary tendencies deepened. Injustice was done, he felt, to the historical and social and practical aspects of Christian truth. From that standpoint he directs a pungent criticism against the theological methods in vogue. They sought to construe Christianity by reference to the conception of God reached by a consideration of His relations to the finite world and human history and experience. Ritschl seeks the meaning of God as it is disclosed in the workings of the soul of Christ and in the activities of His earthly life. It was in that soul and in His earthly experience that the work of Christ in the salvation of men was achieved. Not in the heavens by transactions on man’s behalf within the Trinity, as the orthodox schools taught; nor by His immanent operations in cosmic and human progress, as speculation dreamed; but in the moral personality and acts of the Redeemer. The process of redemption is not metaphysical or evolutionary, it is psychological. It was not to provide the prior conditions which should release the mercy of God, on the one hand; or, on the other, to overthrow an enemy encamped in man. Yet it was more than the announcement as by a prophet that God had forgiven or was ready to forgive. Both Anselm and Socinus failed Ritschl. According to his view, what is meant by God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself is that when God took human nature in Christ He actualized the forgiving presence of God. God in Him was in human nature, not on a visit, not arranging the conditions on which it could be redeemed, but actually redeeming and appropriating it. Christ revealed the Father not by holding Him up to be seen, but by bearing Him in upon us, leavening us with Him practically and consciously. The field of Christ’s work lay therefore in His own spiritual history, and among the conditions of spiritual human nature (cf. Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art, Lect. 7). This is Ritschl’s first important deflexion from Schleiermacher’s procedure. The Christian consciousness or experience to which he appeals is found in the contemplation of the historic Jesus, as made known in the Gospel records. It is not to be regarded in isolated individualism, as was the case with Schleiermacher’s appeal to the inner consciousness. It has in consequence an objective character alien from his method and from the subjectivism and sentimental piety often accompanying it. There is a second deflexion of not less importance. The Christian experience to which Ritschl appeals is realized socially and practically in the Kingdom of God.
‘There must be added [to Schleiermacher’s theory] the pregnant truth that this religion, like all religions and all spiritual activities, can only be rightly set forth in the fellowship which, on the presupposition of the redeeming work of the Founder, exists as the sharing and spreading of this redeeming activity. Redemption, the Redeemer, and the Redeemed Community stand for theological knowledge in an inseparable relation’ (Just. and Recon. i. p. 495 f.).
Ritschl’s doctrine of the Kingdom is specially worthy of study. The Kingdom of God in his view is at once (a) a moral ideal, (b) a social organization, (c) a religious good. The Kingdom and not the individual man is the object of the Divine electing love. To the Kingdom, the Fellowship of Faith, belongs redemption, which is appropriated by the believer only as a member of it. And he shares in it in the measure in which he discharges his obligations towards it; it is as he loves and serves his neighbour that he is justified of God. The reciprocal action and reaction of the community of believers engenders experience of Christ, by which men learn His worth for them. As the value of each is determined by his service to the whole, so is Christ’s worth (equivalent in Ritschl’s phrase to His nature in so far as it can be known to us) to be estimated by His work.
On such principles, what, then, is the worth of Christ? Christ has the worth of God. He is a prophet sent from God, yet more than all the preceding prophets of the OT. He makes Himself known as, and is, the Son of God.
In the moral world all personal authority is conditioned upon the nature of one’s vocation and upon the connexion between one’s fitness for his special calling and his faithful exercise of it. Accordingly the permanent significance of Jesus Christ for His community is based, first, on the fact that He was the only one qualified for His special calling, the introduction of the Kingdom of God; that He devoted Himself to the exercise of this highest conceivable calling in the preaching of the truth and in loving action without break or deviation; and that, in particular, as a proof of His fidelity, He freely accepted in willing patience the wrongs which the leaders of the Israelitish nation and the fickleness of the people brought upon Him, and which were so many temptations to draw Him back from His calling. Second, the work of Jesus Christ in His calling or the final purpose of His life, viz., the Kingdom of God, is the very purpose of God in the world, and is thus recognized by Christ Himself. The solidaric unity between Christ and God, which Jesus accordingly claims for Himself, has reference to the whole extent of His activity in His calling, and consists in the reciprocal relation between the love of God and the obedience of Jesus in His calling. Now Jesus, being the first to realize in His own personal life the final purpose of the Kingdom of God, is therefore alone of His kind; for should any other fulfil the same task so perfectly as He, yet he would be unlike Him because dependent upon Him. Therefore, as the original type of humanity to be united into the Kingdom of God, He is the original object of the love of God, so that the love of God for the members of His Kingdom also is mediated only through Him, When, therefore, this Person, active in His peculiar calling, whose constant motive is recognizable as unselfish love to man, is valued at His whole worth, then we see in Jesus the whole revelation of God as love, grace, and faithfulness’ (Unterricht, pt. i. §§ 21–22). There is a third consideration (§ 23), Christ’s lordship over the world and resurrection. ‘These relations which are necessary to the full appreciation of Jesus and are apparent in the account of His life, are referred to in the confession of the Godhood of Christ which the Christian community has made from the beginning’ (§ 24).
In sum, Christ’s Divinity is confessed when it is seen that His will was in perfect identification with the Divine purpose in things or the will of God; and that He displayed in the moral sphere the highest Divine attributes. He is the Son of God by His perfect knowledge of the Father’s will and by His perfect obedience to it. After this manner He fully revealed the essence of God; and that in the activities of a human life; and in a sinless human life. The Divinity of Christ is thus not based, as is usually done, on the supernatural facts of pre-existence, virgin birth, miraculous works, and resurrection. These, however, are not denied; only, Ritschl would contend, the right appreciation of their truth comes after the moral witness, from reflexion on believing experience.
Ritschlian principles and results have been the subject of violent polemic. It is with their broad effect only that we are here concerned. What that is, is obvious. Ritschl has brought back men’s thought to Christ as the centre of Christianity, to Christ’s character as moral power, and to religion as the builder up of spiritual life by enlightening the conscience and educating the will. Religious truth can be verified by the moral sense. It is a question of fact; inner fact, no doubt, and not scientific, but truer than what is outward. But when the theological reasoner abandons the ground of fact and the safe circle of practical reason for the shifting mirages of speculation, then he uses words without meaning. Christian verity rests primarily on internal experience, and answers to the most urgent necessities of the moral life. It has, indeed, other relations and aspects that transcend experience and, consequently, our understanding. All that can be said there is, Exit in mysteria. Ritschlian modesty is often misunderstood. But it has served to clear the ground within the range of spiritual experience, and floods this ground with light. There is no true doctrine that can contradict this light, or shelter itself from its penetration.
The influence of Ritschl is the predominant theological force of the hour. It is felt wherever the attraction of religious problems is felt. He is best interpreted, not as the propounder of a ‘theology without metaphysics,’ or a ‘religion without mysticism’ (for he propounds neither), but as an exponent of the ‘Christian consciousness’ of Schleiermacher. He closes so far the movement begun by the latter. That movement is familiar to religious thinkers in this country in the more sober theology of Coleridge, of Maurice, and of Erskine of Linlathen, who may justly be termed the guides of the higher religious thinking in England in the first half of last century. Coleridge (1772–1834), adopting Kant’s forms of thought and imbibing Schleiermacher’s spirit, introduced the fruits of their teachings into England, where thought was dominated by Locke in philosophy and Paley in theology. The ‘Reason’ of Coleridge is the ‘Practical Reason’ of Kant, which grasps the higher principles. Like Schleiermacher, he falls back on experience as the test of sacred truth. He believes Christian truth because it ‘finds’ him. Coleridge shared in all the characteristics of the German school from whom he borrowed. He was no metaphysician. He was a great interpreter of spiritual facts, a student of spiritual life, a subject of spiritual experience. He saw in Christianity the true explanation of the facts of our spiritual being. He brought human nature near again to Christianity. He changed the conception of Christianity from being a traditional creed till it became a living expression of spiritual consciousness. ‘After him,’ says Mark Pattison, ‘the evidence makers ceased as beneath the spell of some magician.’ The line of thought marked out by the disjointed reflexions of Coleridge was continued by F. D. Maurice (1805–1872), who had been influenced also by Erskine, and still more by his own inner conflicts. His best energies were absorbed in the interpretation of religious thought from the standpoint of the Incarnation. By it alone, according to his view, could our nature be sufficient for perfect life. Quite in the style of the later Ritschl, he rests faith on historic fact, and finds the essential ground of human life in the Personality of Christ as the Revealer of the Divine will and character. Akin, in like manner, is his insight into the social aspects of Christian truth, the spring of his abounding personal philanthropy, and the inspiration of that movement which had for its chief tenet the social utilization of religion, the movement of Christian Socialism. More apart and less orthodox stood Thomas Erskine, who recalls his friend Fichte in not a few touches of nature and conviction. He was no student as Coleridge, nor of practical bent as Maurice. Meditative and introspective, he sought the truth by patient thoughtfulness and deduction from his own experience—deeper thought, not larger knowledge. He brings out an aspect of the ‘theology of consciousness’ not emphasized hitherto, viz. that religious experience is a growing and endlessly growing inner perception.
The experiential movement has a second phase, which calls for some mention in its bearing on present-day ideas of Christ. It is a phase outside the Churches, although not always, or necessarily, hostile to them. It shows itself in the rise of ethical societies in America, France, Germany, Holland, and this country. Its aims are familiar to us in Britain from the writings of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888). Much theological liberalism moves in the same direction.
In the last forty years a succession of writers has maintained that while the moral and practical elements of Christianity are entirely commendable and necessary, its theology is discredited, and must be abandoned. The aspirations of such writers are not to be confounded with those of writers still more radical, who denounce not only the theology, but the ethics as well, of the Christian Church,—writers including men so widely parted from each other as Nietzsche the Darwinian and Maeterlinck the mystic. Of these societies it is relevant to our purpose to say that they cannot be viewed as within the line of progress. The Ethical Theology, and in particular the school of Ritschl, is sometimes set side by side with them. But without warrant. These societies, often divergent from one another, have a certain unity, and it is precisely by the principle of that unity that they separate themselves from the ethical movement in theology as well as from orthodox Christianity. The Person of Christ is all in all to these last. It is nothing to those schools. They are inimical not only to historical Christianity, but to the historical Christ. They combine in identifying all, in historical Christianity and in the historical Christ, that is not purely moral and spiritual, with the mere swathing bands which the spirit is to outgrow. Nurtured on the modern conscience, they have not drunk its deepest draught, that inner power of Divine mystery which awakens conscience and deepens it as nothing else. The spiritual side of the Christian conscience, in its sense of sin and revelation of Divine pity and forgiveness, is unfelt. It is here, too, that so much ‘Broad’ or ‘Liberal’ religious thought fails. There is a liberalism which is only the rich and complex manifestation of the magnificent capacities of the Christian Faith claiming all life for Christ; and there is a liberalism which, when extracted from the haze which its upholders cast around it, is found to be, in its underlying postulates, totally inconsistent with the historic faith. It seeks a purely spiritual Christ. And when it has found Him, He is neither truly human nor Divine; He is at once a non-historical and a non-mysterious Being. Undogmatic Christianity is simply abstract theism. Against its empty abstraction of the Divine Spirit, and its anaemic conception of Christ’s Person, the experience-theology is a passionate protest.
(3) The Christ of History.—Concurrently with the foregoing movements has gone another, simpler indeed, and, since there are no truths which more readily gain assent or are more firmly retained than those of an historical order, more within the grasp of the popular mind, but also for that very reason more nearly touching the instincts of the popular faith—the historical and literary criticism of the Scriptures. It finds its sources and growth both within and without the ecclesiastical sphere. It is part of the general movement of science, the application of the methods of science, observation, hypothesis, and induction, to the facts of Hebrew and Christian history. It was not likely that the universal spirit of investigation and discovery should feel itself free to range over the whole field of secular history, and be restrained from operating in the departments of sacred. And so the Scriptures have been taken, as scholarship had already been taking the classical books of the ancient world, as a literature of many fragments and times, and of varying authority. Their commands and teaching and records, all alike have been judged according to the occasion and circumstances in which they were given forth. In other words, they have been interpreted, not absolutely, but relatively. The Bible, as to its text, structure, the authorship of its several parts, and its literary and didactic form, is read and understood like all other ancient literature. Then, too, from the theological fluctuations of the 18th and 19th centuries, special impulses entered. Religion, as Coleridge reminds us, consists of ideas and facts both; the Christian religion blends together inseparably the historical and the spiritual. The variations in religious and philosophical theory in consequence closely affect the character of historical study, and in an instance such as that of the Christian history, where the historical substance is large, with effects of the gravest kind. Further, the emergence of the hypothesis of evolution in scientific circles in the middle of last century, and its rapid acceptance and application to all kinds of knowledge, created a temper of naturalism, which reacted on Biblical criticism and Christological doctrines. Especially in the forms of Positivism (Comte) and of Agnosticism (Huxley and Spencer), this temper rejects every form of theism which asserts the personality of the Divine Being and the beneficent character of His relation to the world of men and things; and, professing itself ignorant of anything better, has lost all belief in any wisdom or love but that which springs from the brains and hearts of men. It is a theory which limits knowledge to experience, and experience to the physical senses—the sensations produced in us by the external world. It has its own view of history, and of Christian history, as a natural evolution. The new historical sense, combined with the new interpretation of Christianity, in terms of the facts of man’s existence and human experience, incited to a re-reading of the Biblical records and a resetting of their material data, which has to an extraordinary degree stimulated the interest of the general mind, and most powerfully influenced the growth of a purely humanitarian conception of the Person of Christ. ‘History,’ says Mommsen, ‘has a nemesis for every sin.’ For seventeen centuries the facts of Christ’s life had been carelessly or impatiently treated: they were now to take emphatic revenge.
The process begins with D. F. Strauss (1808–1874). Strauss runs his theory through the Gospels like a ploughshare through a field of daisies. His interest is of a purely negative character. He disintegrates the narratives and dissolves the facts in a series of writings, in which, with frankness and lucidity, he expounds what it has become common to call the point of view of modern science as to Christ’s Person. His object throughout was polemical. It was to find a way out of supernaturalism. Whatever system furnished him with the means of attaining his object he eagerly embraced. In his first book he employs, on the basis of the well-known Hegelian distinction between the idea and the fact, the notional and the historical, his mythical theory as a means of exit; in his last, Darwin and natural science come to his aid.
It is by his ‘mythical theory’ that Strauss is best known. ‘Myth,’ he says, ‘is the creation of fact out of an idea.’ The miraculous is a foreign element in the Gospel narratives of Christ which defies all historical treatment, and the conception of the myth is the means which we shall use in order to eliminate this element from our subject. The mythical principle is well expressed by de Wette: ‘When any record relates inconceivable things in good faith, it is to be considered, not as historical, but as mythical.’ Strauss lays it down as an absolute principle that miracles are impossible, so that every narrative which is in disaccordance with the laws of nature is pronounced to be mythical. The narratives connected with the birth of John the Baptist are poetical myths. That prophet having afterwards played a great part, and having been found in relation with Jesus, the Church judged it appropriate to glorify him in this way. The two genealogies of Jesus have nothing historical about them: they are the work of Judaizing Christians, who believed that the Messiah must necessarily descend from David. The history of the birth, baptism, and temptation of Jesus are myths designed to establish His supernatural origin. Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist, whose work at the outset He undoubtedly wished only to continue; but by degrees He came to believe Himself the Messiah, and hoped to found a political kingdom by supernatural means. Putting the moral laws above the Mosaic, He abolished the latter. He made missionary journeys. He did not perform miracles; but could heal demoniacs, and on that account all sorts of marvellous facts have been attributed to Him. He did not foretell His death or resurrection. He did not institute the Lord’s Supper. The disciples, convinced that the Messiah could not remain in the tomb, had visions and hallucinations which showed Him to them risen again. Life did not exist in Christ in a perfect manner; He is not the ideal of humanity. The traditional faith is entirely without historical foundation.
The work of Strauss was continued with modifications peculiar to themselves by Bruno Bauer and others, and suggested the more serious labours of the Tübingen School, headed by F. C. Baur (1792–1860). The all-important problem was now the historical reality of Jesus. Baur, differing in this from Strauss, seeks a solution through St. Paul, and a critical investigation of the sources of Christianity. His theory shows the influence of the Hegelian category of thesis and antithesis.
In four Epistles—in Romans , 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians—we have, according to Baur, authentic Apostolic documents, genuine Epistles of Paul. They are our best authorities on every question touching the origin, nature, and principles of primitive Christianity. They reveal antitheses of thought, a Petrine and a Pauline party in the Church. The Petrine was the primitive Christian, made up of men who, while believing in Jesus as the Messiah, did not cease to be Jews. The Pauline was a reformed and Gentile Christianity, which aimed at universalizing the faith in Jesus by freeing it from the Jewish law and traditions. The universalism of Christianity, and therefore its historical importance and achievements, are thus really the work of the Apostle Paul. His work he accomplished in the face of, and in spite of, the opposition of the older Apostles. The men who had been with Jesus did not understand Him; Paul did by natural ability. Not the unity but the differences and antagonisms of the Apostolic Age are the key to all its problems, the point on which the constructive historian must stand if he would do his work. The memorials of the struggle and of the compromises by which it was ended lie in the canonical literature of primitive Christianity. They are best understood as Tendenz-schriften.
It is not easy to affirm what position Baur assigns to Christ. He is preoccupied with Paul. In a study on the meaning of the expression ‘Son of Man,’ he strives to reconstruct, by means of the historical data which the Gospels furnish us, the consciousness which Jesus had of Himself and His Messianic character, but the re
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Christ in Modern Thought'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/c/christ-in-modern-thought.html. 1906-1918.
