.^ . . oil BR 121 .F68 1909 Foster, George Burman, 1858i 1918. The Finality of the THE DECENNIAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 'CHICAGO THE DECENNIAL PUBLICATIONS ISSUED IN COMMEMORATION OP THE COMPLETION OF THE EIRST TEN YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY'S EXISTENCE AUTHORIZED BY THE BOARD OP TRUSTEES ON THE RECOMMENDATION OP THE PRESIDENT AND SENATE EDITED BY A COMMITTEE APPOINTED BY THE SENATE EDWAED CAPPS STARE WIL.LAED CUTTING EOLLIN D. SALISBUEY JAMES EOWLAND ANGELL WILLIAM I. THOMAS SHAILEE MATHEWS CAEL DARLING BUCK FEEDEEIC IVES CARPENTER 08KAE BOLZA JULIUS STIEGLITZ JACQUES LOEB THESE VOLUMES AKE DEDICATED TO THE MEN AND WOMEN OF OUR TIME AND COUNTRY WHO BY WISE AND GENEROUS GIVING HAVE ENCOURAGED THE SEARCH AFTER TRUTH IN ALL DEPARTMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE THE FINALITY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION THE FINALITY OF THE CHRIS TIAN RELIGION PART ONE /^^L^lll:^^ [* FEB 7 1910 J/CALSEv "'^ GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER THE DECENNIAL PUBLICATIONS SECOND SERIES VOLUME XVI CHICAGO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 1909 Copyright 1906 by THE UNIVBESITY OF CHICAGO Published January. 1906 Second Impression March, 1906 Third Impression September, 1909 Composed and Printed By The University of Chicago Press Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A. TO POWELL BENTON REYNOLDS MY FIEST GREAT TEACHER "Our age is, in every sense of the word, the age of criticism, and everything must submit to it. Religion, on the strength of its sanctity, and law, on the strength of its majesty, try to withdi'aw themselves from it; but by so doing they arouse just suspicions, and cannot claim that sincere respect which reason pays to those only who have been able to stand its free and open examination." — Kant. PREFACE In the summers "of 1902 and 1903 the author had the privilege to deliver two courses of lectures before the Har- vard Summer School of Theology, to ministers and students for the ministry of many of our Protestant denominations. Those who heard the lectures expressed profound interest in them and earnestly solicited their speedy publication. These are those lectures, but greatly enlarged, even to the extent of additional chapters. It should also be said that the more popular style of the lecture has been eliminated for the most part, though in places not entirely, and a more technical and formal treatment adopted. The delay in their publication has been due to a com- bination of hindrances. Without recounting them to the reader, they yet constitute the author's apology to his original audience, which had the right to expect the book at a much earlier date. In this connection he may say that the second volume — the increasingly constructive part of the work — is expected to appear in the early spring. The author may not claim originality, in the strict sense of the word, for this book. Still, the constructive idea is his, the plan and process of the argument are his, thoughts which are shared by others are independently his, and even the thoughts which are not his by creation are yet his by patient reflection in the course of wide study in philosophy and theology. However, he has sought to write an effective rather than an original book. His sources have been indi- cated sufficiently, he trusts, either in the text or in footnotes. The book is a mirror of the development of the author's own experience — a development, moreover, which has not yet come to a close; a fact which is also mirrored in the Preface book. He believes that a multitude of thoughtful men and women are passing through an experience similar to his own ; and that a greater multitude will travel, with bleeding feet, the same via dolorosa tomorrow and the day after. It is a pathetic and tragic, or inspiring and illuminating, spectacle, according as one looks at it. Be that as it may, to all such the author offers himself as fellow-pilgrim, not without some hope that they may be a little less lonely for his comrade- ship, a little less bewildered for his guidance, and a little less sorrowful and discouraged for his own joy and hope. At all events, he has said what he sees, as was his duty, in a straightforward way, obedient to Robert Browning's advice: "Preach your truth; then let it work." Hence the reader will find no orthodoxy in this book under the mask of liber- alism, and no liberalism under the mask of orthodoxy; but yea is yea and nay is nay, under the firm conviction that whatever is more than these cometh of evil. If the author should sometimes hold back the truth for prudential reasons, he does not see how his fellow-pilgrims could know when he was telling what he believed to be the truth, and when he was holding the truth back for reasons of policy. Liberals will complain of the superfluousness of the chapter on the dissolution of authority-religion. They will say that such a standpoint has been long overcome. The author admits that the battle has been fought and won as regards the question of principle. But it is a fact that the fruits of the victory have not yet been fully harvested. In practice, authority-religion is in full force in all our denomi- nations in some parts of the country, and in somfe of our denominations in all parts of the country. The church's theological Christ still supplants the real Jesus of history, whose spirit alone is the life of our spirit; sacraments instead of the fellowship of Christian persons are set up as the media- tion of salvation; and an external religion of historical occur- Preface rences is substituted for the invisible impression made by- persons. The watchword, "Christianity is an historical re- ligion," is superficially true, but fundamentally false. It means that Christianity is a religion of historical "facts" — "redemptive facts," Heilsthatsachen, they are called — not so very many and not so very certain, neither so many nor so certain as they used to be — whereas it is at bottom a religion of spirit and of personality. It is not a religion of facts, but of values; and values are timeless; that is, Christianity is an eternal religion which is in, but not of, the historical. In the mystery of creative personalities, fructified, indeed, by the stream of history, fountains are opened from which higher values, unattainable by us men of ourselves, stream forth from eternity into the human world. Personalities are the channels of divine grace. Signs are not wanting that this truth is beginning to dawn upon the bearers of the authority cult. The author hopes to have contributed some- what toward realizing in practice — especially in his own denomination, the Baptist, where for long a Catholicizing tendency has been subverting the basic principles of the denomination — the triumph in principle of the religion of persons and not of things, of freedom and not of external authority, of ethical ideality and not of ecclesiastical force or politics. He has but to add that the chapter in question was written as it now stands before the appearance of Saba- tier's posthumous work on the same subject ; and he believes that his briefer, more closely articulated discussion has a mission. Finally, the reader is referred to Introduction for exposi- tion of the plan and purpose of this book. G. B. F. Chicago, December 12, 1905. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION To meet public demand the publishers are under the ne- cessity of issuing a second edition of this volume. Comply- ing with their request for another preface, the author has availed himself of the opportunity to remove many typo- graphical errors. Others there doubtless are, and he would be grateful to the reader for pointing them out to him. From an incidental remark in the preface to the first edition the public was fairly led to expect the early appear- ance of the second volume. Brief reference should be made to the causes which explain the delay. For one thing, the author had been recently transferred — for reasons which need not now detain us — from the chair of theology in the Baptist Divinity School to the chair of the philosophy of religion in the University proper. While the new subject was not new to him, still the preparation of new lectures for his classes entailed more labor than he had anticipated. Consequently his literary work was checked for the time being. Again, not only has the historico-critical study of the Bible and church dogma gone on apace, concerning whose metnods and conclusions the^ author's task required him to keep posted, but a revolutionary philosophical move- ment has become widespread and powerful, since he con- ceived the idea of writing upon the subject of this volume. To deal with the new situation, the author must rewrite his manuscript almost entirely. Finally, as events developed, he made up his mind to mediate the larger work by some smaller books of a more popular character. Of these, the first, The Function of Religion in Manx's Struggle for Exist- ence, has already appeared. The other two volumes, already well under way, are entitled, respectively, A Critique of Preface to the Second Edition xv Christology and Is Religion a Moral Force? Meantime, his publishers, influenced by the importunate demand of the public for the second volume, have urged the author to return to his original intention and to present them with the manuscript of that volume as soon as possible. He now means to accede to their request and to devote all his spare time to that work until it shall be finished. And if all goes well those two popular volumes shall appear at a later date. Reference should be made to another item in the former preface. The author parenthetically intimated that the second volume would be "increasingly constructive." This phrase seems to have led some readers to assume that even in the opinion of the author the first volume was "destruc- tive." He is familiar enough with the history of the church to know that polemical fanaticism has ever, with diplomatic sagacity, identified reform with "destruction." Thus, Paul was anathematized by all those in the Jewish world or in the first Christian community, who considered themselves the only true believers. The Christians of the first cen- turies were branded as destroyers, as men without faith and without law, as Nihilists indeed, by their contemporaries who clung to the traditionary religions. The reformers of the sixteenth century were excommunicated on the charge of blasphemy against all the authorities of their day. And the founders of the modern state everywhere have been stig- matized as anarchists. While reform does involve change, yet reformers are constructive and creative spirits. In the author's opinion, the first volume is constructive in spirit and outcome. He does not deny that there is a destructive side. To take into account, however, only the negative side of his work is to be unjust to him. One might as well re- proach a gardener for vandalism because he prunes and grafts his trees. The destructive side of his book is not only unavoidable and necessary, but is also means to the end xvi Peefaoe to the Second Edition of construction. To be sure, his primary aim is to be true, rather than either destructive or constructive. His deepest interest is the religious life, which, like all life, consists in a perpetual series of transformations wherein the negative factor is as essential as the positive. It also appears that the phrase in question has led other readers to assume that the second volume would be a return to traditionalism. But such an assumption has no right to be made, since "construction" is not equivalent to either "traditional orthodoxy" or "traditional liberalism." The author does not envy and cannot emulate those modern writers who begin with the methods and conclusions of phi- losophical and biblical criticism, then slip a cog, and return in the end to Athanasianism or Socinianism. The second volume will be, in his opinion, at once more "constructive" and less "orthodox" and less "liberal" than the first. The author has never liked the phrase, "liberal Chris- tianity." What he stands for in this regard is "free religion." It is on this account that, so far as he is con- cerned, he can joyously fraternize and cowork with both the most orthodox and the most liberal of Christians. As a matter of fact, it is a somewhat peculiar contention of his that traditional liberalism and traditional orthodoxy, are in principle much the same thing. Both hold to the primacy of ideas and doctrines in religion, differing considerably, indeed, as to what those ideas and doctrines should be. The author is sure that in this matter, both are equally mis- taken, much as he is also sure that liberalism, espousing to some degree the cause of free religion, can the more easily rectify the mistake. The essence of religion is to be found in the willing and feeling side of experience. This was the point of view of Jesus: "Not everyone that saith to me Lord, Lord [or for the matter of that. Second Person in the Trinity, Second Person in the Trinity; or Evolution, Peefaoe to the Second Edition xvii Evolution], but he that doeth the will of my father in heaven, enters into the kingdom of heaven." What did the good Samaritan know about either the Second Person in the Trinity — that is, the deity of Christ — or the hypothesis of evolution? Yet Jesus taught that the good Samaritan was the right sort of man. Important as ideas are, it is the willing and feeling side of religion that is fundamental and unchangeable. The set of ideas, no matter what they are, not only may change, but must change, as new and different historical occasions arise. Orthodoxy con- verts certain ideas into fetishes. It is because liberalism is in a position to abandon obsolete ideas and appropriate new views of the world that it is increasing in volume and power in all our churches. To illustrate what the author means, let him return to the dogma of the deity of Christ. The point is not that this dogma is true or that it is false. The point is, first, that it is secondary and not primary in the Christian religion; and, secondly, that it does not fit in with the modern ideas of the divine and the cosmic. It is not because it has been refuted, it is that there is no con- sistent place for that dogma among the new views con- cerning God and the world. The difficulty is removed by the insight that the essence of Christianity is the spirit of Christ, and not any definition, ancient or modern, of Christ. Therefore all those of every name and nation who partici- pate in the spirit of Christ ought to be able to live and work together in Christian love and honorable controversy, no matter how any of them may define Christ or whether some of them may decline to define him at all. Pray, what would Christ care for the designation, "deity," from those whose lives belie his spirit of love and truth and fairness? Who could imagine Christ at the Final Judgment putting on his left hand among the goats, those who have sought to share his disposition but who have been honestly unable to xviii Preface to the Second Edition assent to any of the biblical or ecclesiastical labels which have been fastened upon him? After all, which is it that constitutes belief in Christ, participation in his spirit, or definition of his person? Participation in his spirit, free- dom to think as one honestly must about his person — that, and that alone, is the trae condition of fellowship and of work in the kingdom of man which is a part of the larger kingdom of God. One more item, akin to the foregoing, claims the author's attention. In the former preface, he referred to the Roman- izing tendency in his own (the Baptist) denomination. Subsequent events have given deplorable confirmation to his judgment on this point. Without burdening this already long preface with an explanation of the causes of this tend- ency, the author wishes to indicate the alternatives which confront his denomination. It may hold (1) that its tra- ditional system of ideas are primary and that its historic freedom which reveals itself in moral love and righteousness, and in the adoption and formation of ideas, is secondary; or, (2) it may cleave to the primacy of freedom and treat its traditional dogmatic tenets and usages as secondary, and therefore variable and changeable. In pursuing the latter (2) policy, it will remain true to its historic genius and mission. Strictly speaking, there can be no heresy, technically so called, in the Baptist denomina- tion, for the reason that there is no creed subscription; no creed subscription, for the reason that there is no formal creed ; no formal creed, for the reason that Baptist churches, unlike the hybrid of ecclesiastical Protestantism, hold to the right of private judgment, of freedom of conscience, and of freedom of thought and speech. It is not that creed is a matter of indiflPerence to religion from the Baptist point of view ; it is that the right of the individual to form his own creed is inalienable, and that this right which was exercised Preface to the Second Edition xix by Baptists in the past, resulting in a certain set of beliefs, carries therewith the right today of either accepting, or modifying, or replacing those past beliefs. But in pursuing the former (1) policy, the denomination atavistically relapses into the essential principle of the Roman Catholic church, to which the historic Baptist prin- ciple is directly opposed; flies in the face of modern ethics and of scientific psychology in its view of religion ; alienates the educated classes; and in due time is doomed to obsolescence and petrification. Now, if the denomination does not apostatize from its historic principle of freedom, there will be peace and prog- ress. For such a principle allows an "orthodox" member to hold to one set of ideas if they suit him and serve him, a "liberal" to hold to another for the same reason — stipulating only that exponents of old and new alike shall support their theoretical positions in Christian love and honorable contro- versy, and that all, old and new, shall be one in the funda- mental purpose of manifesting and spreading the spirit of Christ. But the exponents of the reactionary catholicizing tend- ency reply to this that they do favor freedom of thought and of conscience for those who hold a different set of ideas from theirs, but that the latter must hold them outside and not inside of the denomination. From such a point of view the exponents of the tendency in question are consistent in their apparent purpose to arraign as a heretic any Baptist who, honestly exercising his freedom, comes to opinions different from those traditionally held by the denomination. From such a point of view, our boasted Baptist freedom is a sham, consisting, as such exponents declare, in freedom to go out of the church and think and say and believe what one pleases on the outside. But this is absurd, since happily this latter kind of freedom is not in the keeping of any denomination XX Preface to the Second Edition to dole out to outsiders in this free country. These expo- nents sophistically apply and annul the concept of freedom in the same breath. Sound thought and sound morals are outraged in the interest of their "sound doctrine." As he concludes this preface, the author would fain go back to Jesus once more. Around Jesus the battle still rages, though it is already clear to the scholar what position he shall hold in the religion of the future. "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?" What answer did Jesus make? "Go and tell John the things ye see and hear." That is no direct answer. Jesus did not say: "I am," or "I am not." He said nothing of his per- son, but pointed to his work: "See this movement which I have started," he says; "see the new life and new spirit; is it not of God?" Jesus did not speak of his person, but of his cause. What did Jesus will ? Not himself, nor place, nor power, nor honor for himself, nor dogmas concerning his person. He willed the kingdom of God on earth, he willed the growth and triumph of God's cause, God's revelation and fulfilment in the world until God is all in all. Jesus is not behind us, but before us. Only those who strive for a better future can understand him. Jesus did not found a new religion, which, because it was new, could grow old and perish. In Jesus the final, unchangeable goal of humanity has become clear to all who have eyes to see. It is ours to know that goal ever more clearly, to agonize toward it ever more strenuously. Jesus has told us the simple truth concerning God and man and world. And so long as God is God, man man, and world world, Jesus remains the way, the truth, and the life— the eternally new sun of the spirit. George Burman Foster University of Chicago August 20, 1909 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY Chapter I. Introduction 3 Chapter II. Historical Survey 23 PART I. AUTHORITY-RELIGION ( = SUPERNATURALISM) AND NATURALISM Chapter III. The Formation of Authority-Religion - - 51 Chapter IV. Dissolution of Authority-Eeligion - - 76 Chapter V. The Changed View of the World and of Life 148 Chapter VI. The Naturalistic and the Religious View of the World 196 PART II. THE FINALITY OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT Chapter VII. The Essence of the Christian Religion : The Problem of Method - - - - - 279 Chapter VIII. The Essence of the Christian Religion : Sources of the Life of Jesus - - - 325 Chapter IX. The Essence of the Christian Religion : Jesus 395 INTKODUOTORY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1. The title that would be given to the discussion which herein follows would be different both in different periods of history and in different ecclesiastical and doctrinal move- ments in the present time. An apologist for Catholic orthodoxy would name his work the infallible papacy, or use some equivalent form of words; for Protestant orthodoxy, the infallible Book, Christianity a revealed religion, the deity of Christ, or some kindred terminology ; for Christian rationalism, the divinity of the innate ideas, or eternal truths of reason which are the essence of Christianity, or, in Locke's phrase, the reasonableness of Christianity; for liberal theology of the older type, the perfectibility of re- vealed religion;^ of the modern type, the absoluteness of Christianity;^ for those who accept the hypothesis of the universality and endlessness of "becoming" and "develop- ment," the finality of the Christian religion, as above, inas- much as this caption frankly accentuates the issue as it lies in the minds of most thinkers today. 2. Since the subject as worded by Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy assumes the abstract transcendence of God, the dualism between the human and the divine, and, conse- quently, an apocalyptic revelation, it is manifest that the orthodox treatment rests upon speculative presuppositions \fhich are now entirely discredited, and employs a method of argumentation — namely, the passage from the divine to the human, from the perfection of the revelation to the per- i£. g., Keug, Brief e Uber die Perfectibilitat der geoffenbarten Religion, 2£. g., Teoeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Cliristenthums, 3 4 The Finality of the Cheistian Eeligion fection of the religion, from authority to experience — which is not accorded validity in the modern world. This would seem to be a sufficient justification for abandoning orthodox titles for our book. But the titles of rationalism, with its deistic externality, its unverifiable passage from the innate- ness to the divinity of the essential Christian conceptions, and especially its insensibility to the psychological and his- torical origin of all the so-called innate ideas, are quite as little in harmony with our present convictions of immanence and growth. The word "perfectibility" expresses, as some- thing to be established, what the subsequent discussion assumes, that is, the constant modification and development of Christianity. Thus, it is the obverse side' of our treat- ment and, as such, is correspondingly appropriate as the title of this work. Against the use of the word "absolute" it may be urged that the validity and content of the term are anew under debate. In the old apologetics the word signified "detachedness"' from all conditions of otherwise human process and occurrence. From the point of view then in vogue one could thus consistently speak of "Chris- tianity as the absolute revelation;" for revelation was defined as a kind of unhistorical miraculous supernaturalism, and Christianity was thought of as revelation rather than religion. But according to a later scientific terminology, "absoluteness" came to signify that Christianity, as compared with the relative truths of other religions, is the absolutely perfect form of religion. This signification of the expression has its source in modern evolutionism, especially in Hegel's phi- losophy. But since the expression is retained both by those who accept — e. g., Troeltsch — and those who reject — e. g., Kaftan — these presuppositions, it easily contains something vague and indefinite — as, indeed, is the case with these very 1 " Perfectibility " assumes finality and proves progress; "finality" assumes progress and proves ultimateness. Introduction thinkers themselves, who use the word with significantly dif- ferent nuances; Kaftan, as a rule, having in mind "revela- tion" when he uses it; Troeltsch, "religion." The fact that Ritschl inveighed against further use at all of the word has had its weight: The absolute ! how queer that sounds ! I still faintly remember that I too busied myself with the word in the days of my youth when the Hegelian terminology threatened to draw me also into its vortex. That was long ago. In a measure the word has grown strange to me. I found that there was no far-reaching thought in it.' According to this, the word would seem to point to heights that are either too dizzy or too barren for human experience, and on this account the tendency grew up to discard it from the vocabulary of scientific and reflective thought. In view of these general remarks, it may now be said that it is inadmis- sible to use the expression, in connection with our subject, in the old apologetic sense of "unrelatedness," of Losgelostheit, as the Germans happily say, since in that sense there is no recognition of the historicalness and consequent relativity of Christianity, which is the very conception that gives sting and interest to the problem under consideration; but also that, needless as it would be to choose a title that is repellent to many from the outset, it does not follow that we may not properly interchange the word with "finality," when it is understood beforehand that we use it in the general signifi- cation it has come to have in the current discussion of this subject. Usage has already made the term to include — not forgetting the nuances referred to above — (1) the horizon of universal religious history; (2) the recognition of all non- Christian religions as relative truths; and (3) the appre- ciation of Christianity as that form of religion which rounds out these relative truths to the "absolute." But this third 1 Ritschl, Theologie und Metaphysik, 2d ed., p. 18. 6 The Finality of the Christian Keligion statement already points to the significance of the title which I have chosen: The Finality of the Christian Beligion. The word "finality" is used not so much in the sense of the Latin finis as in that of the Greek reko^, i. e., final not as last, but as the perfect, the consummate, or, last because perfect. Is Christianity the ultimate religion? The word, unlike "abso- luteness," suggests no thought of the "unrelated," the "un- become;" rather it has no meaning save in relation to the conceptions of development, continuity, history, on account of which our problem in its present form has emerged. It is for this reason that its superior appropriateness to those other titles is evident. 3. Further support of this title will be informally involved in the exposition of the nature of the problem, to which we now pass. The problem is due to the method and results of historical science in the field of religious phenomena, to the recognition of the principles of development, and to the modern evolutionistic metaphysics of the "absolute." The religio- historical method employed by the science of comparative religion puts, a priori, Christianity on a stage with other religions and strips it of its character as unique religion. It investigates, for example, the kinship between any given Christian phenomenon and the parallel phenomenon in other religions, and determines what "moments" Christianity has borrowed from other religions. Formerly, the finality of the Christian religion was based upon its isolatedness and singu- larity. But, from the point of view of comparative religion, the very fact that Christianity is an historical religion involves its relationship and interaction with other religions, as against its supposed isolatedness ; and the fact that it has drawn thoughts and ideas and values from other religions raises doubt as to its supposed singularity. Will the study of the various religions yield the scientific conclusion that Inteoduction Christianity is the absolutely perfect religion, or, perhaps, that up to the present time it is but the relatively highest among the religions? Will historical science sustain our traditional assurance that Christianity is not one religion among many, but, as Harnack maintains, the religion, ultimate and incomparable? Again: development, the working hypothesis of the science of religion, is believed to be a valid concept when applied to humanity as a whole. Humanity is forever progressing. In that case, is Jesus final, or may some new Master arise in the evolutionary development of the race who shall supersede Him, as He superseded Moses, for example? If Christian experience is to be referred to the historical personality of Jesus, it would appear that the finality of Christianity is dependent upon the finality of Jesus. But can Christianity be bound to an historical, therefore relative, personality of the distant past, and yet continue to be the ideal religion of our forever- advancing humanity?^ Even granting that the finality of the Christian religion is not indissolubly connected with the finality of its Founder,^ can it be shown — as in that case it must needs be shown — that the adaptability of the Christian religion, originating as it did in comparatively simple rela- tionships, is equal to the inconceivable complexity of the future of humanity, and that its ideality will remain ascend- ant, no matter what the moral elevation to which the race 1 " Can we say that the influence, the spirit, the principle, whatever we may call it, which was first expressed in the life of Christ, is really universal? Can we say that it has shown itself able to overcome or to assimilate all other influences, and that it is certain to do so still more in the future? .... Has Christianity been only one force among others, struggling with them in such a way that the result is like a mechanical resultant which cannot specially be attributed to either of the conflicting elements? Or has the action of these upon it always produced a reaction, like the reaction of a living being upon an environment suited to it, so that the new element was taken up into it, and made the means to the development of a higher life?"— E. Caird in New World, Vol. VI (1897), p. 12. 2 There is valid objection to the word " Founder," since sects, not religions, are " founded." This will be taken up in a much later connection. 8 The Finality of the Christian Religion may mount? This would be tantamount to showing that the Christian type of religion, and this alone, has inner right in the spiritual development of the race, that this type of religion is an inalienable constituent of human nature, or, in Tertullian's words, mens hiimana naturaliier Christiana. But when we pass on to philosophy, we are told that the category of development is applicable not merely to the study of religion, not merely to human history in general, but to Reality as a whole. Our mode- philosophy preaches to us that there is nothing static, nothing fixed, nothing final, but that mutation and process characterize all that is; nay, that it belongs to the very nature of the "absolute" to grow. Can Christianity, then, be final? Thus it has come about that our religion, with a Master and a message which claim to be the same yesterday, today, and forever, is summoned before the judgment seat of a progressive humanity, like all other professed finalities, and that the human heart, with its tumultuous experiences, is querying whether there be, amid the flux, some Eternal Rock whereon it can find strength and stay and rest. From this description of our task, it appears that our discussion belongs under the head of apologetics. It is the business of apologetics, first, to vindicate the religious view of the world and judgment of life against anti-religious con- ceptions; secondly, to support the superior content of the Christian religion to that of the pre-Christian and extra-Chris- tian religions ; thirdly, to adduce the reasons for believing that Christianity is the ultimate religion. System requires that this task should be accomplished in the order here indicated. But I am not now concerned with systematic apologetics, and need therefore devote but incidental treatment to the first and second part of this program, as auxiliary to my main purpose. My purpose is to disengage the third part Intkoduction 9 from the others and devote to it an orderly, but not an apologetically formal, examination from the point of view of modern culture. Our inquiry is, as was set forth a moment ago, whether we may regard "Christian" as the permanent adjective by which we must define the growing ideal of humanity; whether, as Goethe puts it in his wonderful tale, the Fisherman's hut can widen into the temple of the Universe. It is manifest that a discussion of this problem involves a close definition of the essential spirit of Christianity. The nature of Christianity has been revealed in two historic forms: religion of authority, and religion of the spirit,' or of freedom, or of personality, or of the moral consciousness of man. Our first duty is to trace the rise, development, and dis- integration of Christianity as authority-religion ; our second is to define Christianity as religion of the spirit, with a view to determining whether the highest spirit of the modern world can and will in the long run call itself Christian. But religion of the spirit is opposed by Naturalism on the one hand, as by authority-religion on the other. The treatment will accordingly fall into two sections: the first destructive, being a criticism of supernaturalism and naturalism; the second constructive. To be sure, there will also be a pre- liminary chapter upon the history of the treatment of the subject up to the modern standpoint, reserving, however, contemporaneous discussion for fuller examination under our constructive endeavor. 4. Quite as controversial as the main subject itself is the method by which the problem is attacked. Both the religio- historicaP and the dogmatic or normative^ methods have their able representatives. Is the judgment, "Christianity 1 This was written before Sabatier's book with this title appeared. See my preface. 2£. g., Troeltsch. 3 e. g., Kaftan. 10 The Finality of the Christian Religion is the final religion," a judgment of existence, or is it a judgment of value ? Must the criterion as to which religion is the more worthful, which has claim to unique validity, be borrowed from one's own judgment ; that is, from a judgment which has been Christianly formed ? If so, it is not a scientific judgment, but an affair of faith. If the judgment in question be religio-historical — that is, scientific — it may indeed have universal validity, but it is not "absolute ;" if it be a value-judgment, it may be absolute for him who enacts it indeed, but cannot on that account claim universal validity. While the position of this work is that both the methods in question are indispensable to the fulfilment of our task — the religio-historical to determine what the reality is in whose finality we are interested, the normative to evaluate that reality — the ultimate decision of the matter is an affair of faith rather than of empirical science, and is therefore the prerogative of the normative method. But it is just on this account that it is necessary to show that a value- judgment may also have universal validity. Inasmuch as this question of method, however, is an integral part of the constructive task, the consideration of the steps by which one may come to approve a certain religion as the best must be postponed rather than treated at length in an introduc- tion. But this brief reference to plan and method may satisfy the preliminary need of the reader. He will perceive that my question is not primarily that of the passing and the permanent in Christianity, but, rather, whether there be any permanent or not. Supposing the diflicult task of dis- tinguishing between form and substance, principle and phe- nomena, spirit and manifestation, has been accomplished, there still remains the question as to whether the finality of the essential nature of Christianity can be maintained. 5. Among current problems in theology this is one of the Introduction 11 most serious and important. Professor Kaftan says^ that Christianity stands or falls with its conviction that it has the perfect knowledge of God, so far as that knowledge is attainable for men who dwell upon the earth. Recently, reviewing Harnack's Das Wesen des Christenthums, he again declares that no one of the great forms of Christianity which have successively arisen in the church has ever been shaken in its conviction of the "absolute" importance and significance of Christianity. "Each one of these forms," he says in so many words, "has built in one way or another on the Deity of Christ .... through Him the Eternal God has become a fact in the history of humanity."^ With this faith Chris- tianity stands or falls, not indeed for the individual, but as concerns its existence and duration in history. And Her- mann agrees with Kaftan's grave judgment. To the very nature of Christianity, he says, belongs the conviction that it contains the real truth for all men ; as Christians we have the conviction that the essence of religion is expressed perfectly in Christianity, and in Christianity alone. "Jesus brought into history an ahsoliifiim,^'' he declares. Jesus is not simply prophet, for a prophecy can continue without the prophet. But Jesus is redeemer, and redemption cannot exist dis- sociated from the redeemer. Jesus stands not simply upon the summit of humanity, but over against humanity; and, consequently, Christianity is not the climax of religious development, but stands over against religion, as a redeemer over against the redeemed. So, in substance, Hermann. And when Troeltsch, dominated in his theological thinking by the ideas of evolution and of historical relativity, doubts all this, Hermann, like Kaftan, replies that it is a question of the life and death of Christianity, and that if the con- sistent thinker (they do not think that Troeltsch is consistent) 1 Dogmatik, p. 24. 2 ChristUche Welt, 1902, No. U. 12 The Finality of the Chkistian Religion comes to occupy the position of Troeltsch, he will not stop there, but go on to the naturalistic monism of Haeckel. These, not to mention Fairbairn^ and others, are great and represen- tative theologians, and their words may reinforce our sense of the seriousness of the situation. At all events, significance must be attached to the unanimity with which apologists assert that Christianity as a fellowship of believing Chris- tians stands and falls with the confession of the revelation of the living God through Jesus Christ, and thus with the certainty of its own absoluteness and supernaturalness, much as we may hesitate with regard to the demonstrative value of the assertion. 6. The justification for our undertaking this debate is a consideration to which attention must be given at some length in these introductory remarks, inasmuch as objections will doubtless be urged against both the substance and the stand- point of the discussion. a) In our time of interrogation of every belief which solicits our adhesion, of the shaking of everything that can be shaken in order that those things which cannot be shaken may be seen to abide, the looming up of our question was only a question of time. The scientific impulse has awakened among us, as it has among every healthy and intellectual people; and those who are called to realize this impulse feel themselves under the conscientious obligation, on behalf of truth and without regard to con- ventions, fears, or prejudices, to make everything an object of investigation which can be an object of human knowl- edge. After its long examination of nature, science is now ordering all history before its judgment seat. As science requires the whole region of nature, even that concerning which the Sacred Scriptures have expressed opinion, so does ^Philosophy of the Christian Religion (last part). Inteoduction 13 it enter the whole region of history, even that in which the Christian revelation has been unfolded. Science also judges every form of cognition and thought; even that which was valid at the time of the bearers of the revelation, and which determined their own thought and discourse. And science knows no other law than its own and no other authority than truth. Thus it was inevitable that our question should arise, after the whole region which we call Christianity was inundated. The waters of criticism show no consideration for values, but follow, like inundations, their own laws. This inevitability of the onward march of science is itself a vindication of the right to raise our question. 6) But it is expected as well that the discussion shall be of real service to the modern religious interest. For one thing, it should contribute toward the formation of a theological conscience which will insist upon scientific honesty and consistency in dealing anew with the most difficult and *' dangerous" questions. Alms from other sciences is no honor to theology and is no need of religion. The true theologian will not extend pity toward Christianity with its claim to absoluteness or finality, as one sometimes does to an old man in his dotage. Instead of holding Christianity to be a senile affair, dependent upon forbearance, the theologian must approach his religion with the most scientific exaction in virtue of his own strong confidence in its living power. If the result of his scientific reflection should be the conviction that no theory can retire the abstract possibility that Chris- tianity may be surpassed somewhere, sometime, through a still profounder disclosure of the supreme Reality, it would but strengthen all of us in the invaluable work of rendering to science the things that are science's and to God the things that are God's. It would then appear as never before that the Christianity with which science with its genetic method 14 The Finality of the Christian Keligion has to do is not the whole of Christianity, any more than the light with which optics has to do is the whole of light. And the confession of the theologian that he is not com- petent with the instruments at his disposal to adduce scien- tific proof of the finality of the Christian religion in obedi- ence to the demands of the church, only disappoints and even irritates the " intellectualists " indeed, yet may very well turn out to the furtherance of the gospel. Theological science now recognizes the limits of its capacity, as does every other science. We no longer believe that science, even though it be theological, is in a position to solve the supreme questions and riddles of human life. Into the mystery of religion and of Christianity it is not able to penetrate. But, for another thing, a critical examination of our problems may fairly be expected to render, in one particular, a much-needed service to the ministry. After generous allowance has been made for exceptions — and this should, indeed, be generous — the ministry, in matters where science has the right to adjudicate, is too sure where science doubts. Veraciousness of character, the sense for truth, verity and purity of personal conviction,' courage and power of dispo- sition— these are the great desiderata of the ministry in modern culture, and these qualities can be developed and matured, in the case of many, by encouraging them to face, 1 Of the situation in England, J. Allanson Picton writes as follows: " The real reason for moral failures in education is that we have ceased to believe in the old creeds, and have not the moral courage to acknowledge it to ourselves. Or, if we acknowledge it to ourselves, our case is still worse, for we maintain a lying pretense before others. Teachers are compelled to recite formally, as though they believed them, Bible stories and professions of faith which both intellect and conscience reject Preachers delude themselves and their hearers with ingenious sophistries such as in the market would incur a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. And yet, amid this mephitic atmosphere of falsehood, we expect that loyalty of soul, and truth in the inward parts, and simplicity of character shall flourish. Surely the time has come when lies and hypocrisy should be swept out from the Temple of the Lord. For these choke prayer and make worship almost a blasphemy." Introduction 15 at the cost of honest pain, the scientific doubt as to the finality and indispensableness of our Christian faith.' It is in this connection that I may anticipate the opposition to the following critical dissolution of Christianity as an author- ity-religion. First, in Harald Hofi'ding's somewhat keen remark : To make religion a problem may be offensive to many. But thought, where it is once awakened, must have the right to investi- gate everything, and only thought itself can draw the bounds to thought. Who else should do this? He who has espied no problem has naturally no reason to think; but such a one has no reason to keep others from thinking. Whoever fears the loss of his spiritual house of refuge, let him keep away. No one wishes to rob a poor man of his only lamb — then the poor man may not need- lessly drive it along the crowded thoroughfare, and demand that traffic shall stop on his account. Moreover, experience shows that it is the rams rather than the lambs which loudly proclaim, in season and especially out of season, that they are offended and scandalized. It is not so much the really spiritually poor as it is the obstinate and blustering ecclesiasts who raise such a clamor when free inquiry enters upon its rights to bestir itself in the religious, as in every other region.^ Secondly, it must be borne in mind that the retirement in principle of Christianity as authority-religion has been brought about by no single individual. Partly, the soil and climate to which this type of our religion was indigenous have changed, and it is on this account that it is ceasing to survive there, and not because it has been logically refuted ; just as Apollo and Minerva have perished, not through logical refu- tation, but through the modification of the human conscious- ness out of which these ideas sprang. Partly, again, the i"Itis absolutely necessary that the future preacher live through in his own experience the whole critical inquiry, historical and dogmatic, that he epitomize iu himself the crisis of the times, in order that he may mature that personal convic- tion which will enable him to say: 'This is mine, this have I conquered for my- self.' Thus study has a profound ethico- religious significance."— A. Schweitzee. 2 Religionsphilosophie, pp. 2 f. 16 The Finality of the Christian Religion retirement of authority- religion has been brought about by a process of immanent criticism carried on by our religion itself in the course of its history. Alien criticism on the part of any single individual could be estopped; but the religion's own self-criticism is structural, and therefore irresistible. With the addition of but little of my own, I follow docilely along the track of this criticism as it has been objectively consummated in the course of the centuries, and attempt simply to harvest the results. Thirdly, the retirement of Christianity as author- ity-religion is the negative side of the work of a return to the religion of Jesus, which was the religion of freedom, of the spirit. The ultimate test of truth with him was neither authority nor speculation, but experience. For him life was the criterion of life. Nothing is farther from the truth than to say that he grounded his glad message of the kingdom of God on external authority. Nothing so little corresponds to his procedure as a compulsory dogma. Jesus' grounds of faith are all without exception of a moral kind. He even said that a moral word from Moses was worth more as evidential value in his gospel than if one should rise from the dead. His reasons are not hostile to Reason, but to the dormant will, to the antagonisms of the flesh. With the freedom of a prophet, and not with the servility of a Pharisee, his whole attitude to authority lends the most reassuring support to the modern struggle for the autonomy of the human spirit as against its heteronomy, whether the principle of that heteronomy be declared to be the Church or the Book. Fourthly, it is because we have been leaning more upon the historical guarantees of faith which authority proffers, than upon the ever-living God, that every critical question begets disquie- tude and rancor in the clergy ; for it is precisely such guarantees upon which the corrosive work of criticism is felt. Moreover, until we relinquish our authority-religion in actual practice Introduction 17 there will be a continuance of this religions alarm, which is always a characteristic mark of an age which has become partly sensitive, partly fatigued and faith-weak. Fifthly, it may be indicated, finally — what will be apparent later — that Christianity as an authority-religion is based upon the old static view of reality, a Weltanschauung which is now an overcome standpoint; and that Christianity as primarily a religion of freedom, of the will, of the moral consciousness, belongs to the new view of reality as process, becoming, development. These considerations are enumerated to justify to the ministry the first negative section of this book, even though it involves a retirement of clericalism — a retirement in which ministers themselves should rejoice. One thing in particular should be borne in mind. The section devoted to authority-religion is rather the history of the logical than of the historical criticism of the subject. It is this circumstance which must explain the absence of any setting forth of the relative justification of the authoritative tradition and institution of the past when viewed against the background of the history which produced them and which they in turn served. Historical criticism would be thus appreciative. But logical criticism is concerned, not with the historical value of the system of authority, but with its inner consistency and with its truth from the standpoint of the modern view of the world and judgment of life. Thus the fulfilment of my task precludes an expression of the veneration and valuation which I accord to the system of religious control, with its pedagogic urgency upon historic life. Due attention to this limitation of method in compassing my end will save from misunderstanding and hostility. To be sure, in all these remarks I have not pushed the liberty to criticise authority-religion to its full extreme. 18 The Finality of the Cheistian Religion Were I to do so, I should have to point out that the task of science is neither to quiet nor to disquiet ; nor is it its task to serve ecclesiastical preference or complacency — the time has gone by when science was constituted a handmaid of the church — but to give honor to the truth. There is a courage of truth which deserves recognition because it is the fulfilment of a duty. Of all things, religion is not served by unveraciousness, to which, moreover, the diplomatic veiling of the truth belongs. From intelligent laymen I anticipate less trouble. But of three things they, too, should be assured. First, "I have never desired, nor do I now desire, to disturb the contentment or the faith of anyone. But where these are already shaken, I desire to point out the direction in which I believe a firmer soil is to be found. "^ Secondly, there are historical situa- tions, and the present is one of them, when an unsettled faith is not an unmitigated evil. It belongs to that experience in which one makes the transition from tutelage to one's major- ity, from passive dependence upon tradition, in which one simply has faith in another's faith, to the active organization of convictions of one's own. Faith is not simply a gift, it is also a task. Thus, it is not simply the amount that one be- lieves, but it is how one comes by his belief, and what one does with it, that is decisive of character, even as to have eked the merest livelihood out of inhospitable Scotch hills may be both cause and effect of more human virility than to have laid up much goods for many years from more produc- tive climes. Our age is not one in which faith can bulk large. But, as it is not the amount that one gives that makes one a true giver, so it is not the quantity that one believes that makes one a true believer. The main thing is one's interior attitude to the world and to life, and not the 1 With Steauss, The Old Faith and the New, pp. 9f. Intkoduction 19 quantum of the credal output. Thirdly, much spiritual distress will be averted if one will but learn to distinguish between what is cause and what is effect in religion. Psy- chologically considered, we have a series of subjective psy- chic states which we call religion: feeling and need, fear and hope, enthusiasm and resignation, joy and sorrow. There is also a series of objective doctrinal traditions and religious institutions which are likewise called religion, authority- religion. Now, in which is the essence of religion — in the subjective religiosity, or in the historical objective elements ? Psychological and historical investigation yields the conclu- sion that it is in the former. Religion in the peculiar sense of the word is a state of the human subject. The objective historical doctrinal traditions and institutions are not pri- marily cause, but effect; are never end in themselves, but only means to the end of expressing and arousing subjec- tive religious life in the soul. An objective historical re- ligion lives only so long as it finds confessors. The service to the reader of the subsequent criticism of the stability of authority-religion will depend largely upon the attention which he bestows upon these introductory observations.^ 7 . If the subsequent discussion in its negation of authority- religion may fail, because of its destructive mission, to win the sympathy of clericalism at the one extreme, the method and conclusion of its construction in the section de^zoted to i"We live in a time of transition. There is a lack of harmony between our faith and our knowledge and life. To bring free knowledge and the free unfolding of life into harmony with that which is of most worth, is an inescapable task. This task may not be accomplished in the way of speculation and of construction. A new type of life must be formed which does not fear criticism, nor express its freedom by mocking its fetters, but, with glad confidence, expresses its deepest experiences in a 'Psalm of Life.' So long as such a type of life is not reached, many men will suffer injury in their souls — now cleaving with diseased overtension to something which does not harmonize with their personal life or with the requirements of intellectual honesty; now allowing their secret anxiety to drive them to fanatical hatred toward those who do not believe as they do ; now becoming hyper-critical and blas6; and now consumed in restless reflection. It is not said that those who receive greatest injury also suffer greatest pain." — HOFFpiNG, 02}. cit., pp. 340, 341. 20 The Finality of the Christian Keligion the religion of personality may very well count upon opposi- tion from the side of naturalism at the other extreme. Nat- uralism allows room only for demonstrable knowledge, not for personal conviction; for existential judgments, not for judgments of worth. To be sure, the witness of history would probably support the opinion that in scientific candor and thoroughness naturalism is superior to clericalism. And, indeed, it has its elements of truth to which it owes its spread and popularity. Briefly said, they lie in the energetic effort to protect the right of the objective world against our petty human overstrained subjectivity. Its recognition of the great orders pervading the whole cosmos as well as human existence, and its emphasis of inexorable objective fact over against subjective desires, form the inalienable kernel of truth of this view of the world, which must be honored, moreover, from the Christian side also. One can even say that its manifest endeavor after the unvarnished truth is a genuinely Christian feature, and, as the development of natural science proves, has flowered out directly on the soil of Christian civilization. The error of naturalism, like that of materialism, consists in its approach to the denial of spirit — in the degree in which it ignores the importance which the thinking subject with its activities necessarily has for the apprehension of the single object as well as for the construc- tion of the whole view of the world. And it is but of a piece with this when naturalism denies , the naturalistic underiva- bility of personality. A consideration of this point, which would lead us too far afield for an introduction, is a prime matter for discussion in a later connection. So far as our subject is concerned, naturalism is in the right in holding that Christianity as an historical reality is, like every other religion, an object of religio-historical in- quiry. And it is right also in maintaining that there is no Intkoduction 21 other method for the investigation of Christianity than the general historico-critical method, and that no other qualities are necessary in the investigator than those required by religio-historical investigation in general. But naturalism errs in refusing to recognize that the historical investigation of Christianity, like every historical science, has its limits precisely at the points where the divinatory creative word or the value-judgment of the investigator becomes necessary in order to the vivification of the material which has been aggre- gated in an objectively critical way ; and that this is especially true of the investigation of the history of Jesus and of the apostolic or prophetic Christians of all times. In a word, naturalism, clinging too closely to natural science and mathe- matics in its study of the human, fails to do justice to the whole of the human, and hence to the Christianly human. Thus if clericalism be false by excess, naturalism is false by defect; and after we have gone the full length with natural- ism, the question must still be raised whether the last word concerning single personalities, as concerning historic Chris- tianity as a whole, must not be metahistorical — a word, there- fore, which the scientific method is not competent to utter. Furthermore, while its criticism of an external revelation as defined by clericalism is doubtless well taken, naturalism fails to recognize at anything like its true worth the idea of an inner, ethico-religious revelation. But perhaps the limits of naturalism may be best indi- cated by taking a special case. I refer to the old question of the sinlessness of Jesus, or, positively expressed, the religio-ethical perfection of Jesus. The religious need is thought to require its affirmation, since it is believed thai he could not have been mediator between God and man, had he lacked this perfection. This leads to the familiar con- struction that Jesus is the embodiment of the ideal of 22 The Finality of the Christian Religion liiimanity. Now, naturalism rightly points out that the total data of the inner and outer life of Jesus are not in our possession, and that therefore our judgment in reference to the matter is founded on a basis inadequate to satisfy the demands of the scientific conscience. But it overlooks the main point, namely, that the criterion of what is sinful and what is sinless does not have its origin in science as con- strued by naturalism, and cannot be employed by naturalism without admitting a world of values of which by hypothesis it knows nothing. Naturalism thus can neither affirm nor deny sinlessness. But on that account it cannot consist- ently oppose another judgment on the data which springs from other sides of the human spirit than the merely theo- retical. But enough has been said to indicate our purpose to decline to accept uncritically the naturalistic conception of development and immanence, as also its contention that natural science is the whole of science, and that the natural- science method can disclose the whole of reality. To recapitulate: After a chapter containing the history of thought on the subject, the discussion is divided into two parts: "Authority-Religion (= Supernaturalism) and Naturalism," and "The Finality of Christianity and the Idea of Development." In the first part the rise, develop- ment, and disintegration of Christianity as authority-religion are traced; also, the history and critique of naturalism are summarized. In the second part the constructive task is attacked. To this end the respective merits of the dogmatic and the religio-historical methods are examined. Finally, in the light of the mystery and underivability of personality, on the one hand, and of evolution, on the other, the problem of the book is discussed. CHAPTER II HISTORICAL SURVEY The old form of the new controversy was called, by a title more appropriate than any other, the perfectibility of revealed religion. And it seems advisable to introduce the discussion of the new controversy by an outline history of the old. Is revelation progressive? From the point of view of antecedent probability opinion has divided. Since revelation had its origin in the Most Perfect of all beings, the position that it was perfectible was in contradiction with the concept of revelation and amounted to a defamation of its origin. So one party said. But since revelation was divine instruc- tion of an imperfect, developing human being, the idea of the perfectibility of revelation seems to be the truer one. So the other party said. And this party could urge, as a presumption in support of its contention, the perfectibility of an earlier revelation by a later in the relation of the New Testament to the Old, If the Old Testament required to be completed by the New, is there any antecedent improba- bility that the New Testament itself needed to be supple- mented by new revelations still ? Is the New Testament revelation capable of still further perfecting? That was the old problem. In favor of the finality of the revelation, it was urged that it was such to the Christian consciousness; to the latter, it was the last, highest, definitive. The thesis was also supported by an appeal to the New Testament itself. It taught that the advent of Christ was practically the end of the world — an end post- poned for a little, that all peoples might know of his arrival, 23 24 The Finality of the Christian Keligion and be invited to faith. Before Christ all was preparatory; he is fulfilment. Beyond what was given to humanity in his person and doctrine, since the fulness of the Godhead dwelt bodily in him/ nothing objectively higher could be given — no further object ive progress in revelation was pos- sible. In all the future there can be only subjective progress in the appropriation of what was proffered in Christ. Those who thus defended the finality of revelation quoted the great words of Ephesians: "Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the ful- ness of Christ."^ But the party of the perfectibility of the Christian religion could quote Scripture also. It was thought that the author of the fourth gospel somewhat transformed and added to what was delivered by Jesus; that he drew upon the Alexandrian philosophy for this purpose ; and that he sought to protect these additions from the reproach of falsification by saying that Christ himself pointed to a subsequent ob- jective development^ of his teachings — not denying that Christ would still be the principle of this development. Jesus had been far from able to communicate all truth to his disciples, on account of their slow power of comprehen- sion.* When he tried to tell them of deeper things, they did not catch his meaning. He had to leave such matters to the Paraklete,* who should be sent on his own departure, and who would make clear to the disciples the things that Jesus had said and they had not grasped. The Paraklete would also set forth new truth.^ Now, it was to these Johannean passages concerning the Paraklete that appeal was made by those who maintained 1 Col. 2:9. 2Eph. 4:13. 3 John 16: 14. * John 16: 12. 5 John 14: 26. 6 John 16: 13; c/. note 3. Historical Survey 25 the legitimacy and necessity of an objective perfectibility of the religion founded by Jesus. One first of all thinks of the Montanists in this con- nection. They distinguished four ages of the church: the period of natural religion or the innate idea of God; the period of the law and the prophets, or the Childhood of the Church; the period of the gospel, or the Youth of the Church ; and, lastly, that of Montanus, or the period of the Paraklete, that is, the ripe Manhood of the Church, The rule of Faith, indeed, remained unchanged and incapable of improvement. Further developments would be mainly dis- ciplinary, though theoretical disclosures were not excluded. It is from Tertullian,* "On the Veiling of Virgins," that we gain most information on this point: The rule of faith, indeed, is altogether one, alone immovable and irreformable; the rule, to wit, of believing in one only God omnipotent, the Creator of the Universe, and his Son Jesus Christ This law of faith being constant, the other succeed- ing points of discipline and conversation admit the novelty of cor- rection; the grace of God, to wit, operating and advancing even to the end. For what kind of (supposition) is it, that, while the devil is always operating and adding daily to the ingenuities of iniquity, the work of God should either have ceased, or else have desisted from advancing? whereas the reason why the Lord sent the Para- klete was, that, since mediocrity was unable to take in all things at once, discipline should, little by little, be directed and ordained, and carried on to perfection by that Vicar of the Lord, the Holy Spirit What then is the Paraklete's administrative office but this .... the advancement toward " the better things " (Eccles, 3:1)? Nothing is without stages of growth. Look how creation advances little by little to fructification So, too, righteousness — for the God of Righteousness and of creation is the same — was first in a rudimentary state, having a natmral fear of God : from that stage it advanced, through the law and the 1 The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV, pp. 27 f. Tertullian, eccentric and rigoristic, identified himself with Montanism about 201 or 202 A. D., and became one of its most energetic and influential advocates. 26 The Finality of the Chkistian Keligion prophets, to infancy; from that stage it passed, through the gospel, to the fervour of Youth; now, through the Paraklete, it is settling into maturity. Again, in his "On the Resurrection of the Flesh," ^ Ter- tuUian writes: Almighty God, by pouring out his spirit in these last days (i. e., in Montauism) hath reanimated men's faltering faith; and cleared from all obscurity and equivocation the ancient scriptures of both God's testaments by the clear logic of their (sacred) words and meanings. He goes on to say that God has now dispersed all the per- plexities of the past through "the new prophecy, which de- scended in copious streams from the Paraklete." This is the first instance of a theory of development which assumes an advance beyond the New Testament and the Christianity of the apostles. No criticism is offered here, but the reader is reminded that the theory jeopardizes the "sufficiency of Scripture," a consideration of which Tertul- lian does not seem to have been aware. The Catholic church rejected this attempt at a further development of Christian revelation; but not the general theory, as her prin- ciple of tradition, for example, shows. On the contrary, she applied it.^ Moreover, according to Catholic doctrine, the 1 The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. Ill, p. 591, 2 Vincent of Lerirmm inhis "A Commonitory." chap, xxiii. says: " But some one will say perhaps. Shall there, then, bo no progress in Christ's church ? Certainly, all possible progress. For what being is there, so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it ? Yet on condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the faith. For progress requires that the subject bo enlarged in itself, alteration that it be transformed into something else. The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doc- trine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning." In an apt and beautiful figure Vincent proceeds to compare the growth of religion in the soul to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. ( The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, Vol. XI, pp. 147 f.) Historical Survey 27 Holy Spirit continues to work in the church, and to develop doctrine and institution. But in the later Middle Ages this Catholic development of Christianity came more and more to be recognized as dis- figuration; hence in a part of the Franciscan order there grew up an Enthusiasm similar to the old Montanism. As compared with the profligacy and pride of the clergy, the poverty of the mendicant orders seemed alone to be the per- fect life. Thus once again three ages of the church were dis- tinguished: the carnal life till Christ; the half -carnal, half- spiritual, till the time of the mendicant orders; finally, the purely spiritual age founded by St. Benedict and brought to full development by Franciscans, especially Joachim. With the full dawn of the age of the Spirit, which Joachim expected in the year 1260, the institutions of the second period — church, papacy, Monasticism, humanity of Christ, sacraments — would vanish as to form and abide only as to their innermost content. The Spirit of itself alone will work immediately and inwardly. Instead of the outer his- torical gospel, there will be the eternal gospel, whose essence is precisely immediacy, freedom from all letter.* In his eloquent way, Joachim declared that, as the splendor of the sun is to that of the stars and the moon, as the most holy place is to the forecourt and sanctuary, as spirit to letter, as law in the heart to that on tables of stone, so was the new eternal gospel to that of the Old and New Testa- ments. The latter, therefore, is annulled by the former — the three ages are those of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the last age all figurative knowledge ceases, and the truth of the two Testaments appears unveiled." 1 Karl Mullee, Kirchengeschichte, Vol. I, p. 579. 2 In this connection appeal was made to 1 Cor. 13:9 f. 28 Thb Finality of the Christian Keligion While it cannot be denied that both the Montanistic and the Franciscan theory of development were a protest against a false externality and static finality of religion, and an attempt toward a return to a true internality, yet the form of this supposed new revelation was fantastic, and the content was of an enthusiastic, ascetic character. Moreover, what was mainly an objectionable content was brought to light by this supposed continuation of the Holy Spirit in ecclesias- tical regimes, namely, illumination, independent of and transcending the written Word of God. According to Luther, it was this that the two extremes, orthodox Catholi- cism and enthusiasm, had in common.* The Reformers were of the opinion that nothing was to be gained by further new revelation. They believed that any further development of Christianity could consist only in a return to its original pure form in biblical Christianity — a return which, accord- ing to extremists, amounted to a duplicated and copied apos- tolic church. Thus the fountain of divine revelation which flowed steadily on in the Catholic church had been drained from the Protestant point of view, and its living water was stand- ing in the vessel of Sacred Scripture. Later the dogma of inspiration was elaborated in minute detail; the Bible eo ipso was divinely revealed; the primitive form of the manifesta- tion of the Christian life and doctrine was normative for all subsequent time; modern Christians, as compared with first Christians, were assigned second rank; and to live a Chris- tian life was to imitate Christ much as the real copied the world of ideas in primitive Platonism. Let the new age and the new man be a duplicate of primitive Christianity — and so ecclesiastical Protestantism petrified, judaized, external- ^Art. Smalcald., VIII, 4: "Quid quod etiam Papatus simpliciter est merus enthusiasmus, quo Papa gloritur, omnia jura esse in scrinio sui pectoris, et quidquid ipse in ecclesia sua sentit et jubet, id spiritum et justum esse, etiamsi supra et contra scripturum et vocale aliquid statuat et praecipiat." Historical Survey 29 ized ! Thus in the seventeenth century ecclesiastical Protes- tantism vied with Roman Catholicism in identifying a definite historical form of the manifestation of Christianity with its abiding essence.' This identification of the two, of Christianity's spiritual essence with a given historical mani- festation, is none the less a perversion of the proper relation between the two, because it was partly due to opposition to a one-sided independentism which tended to dissolve the con- nection between the essential and the historical. But it was by this one-sided independentism that further development was effected. On account of the stationariness referred to above, demand at length arose — nor could it fail to arise — to uncover (using again the former figure) another living fountain, which should be all the more free and copi- ous, albeit it was not quite pure Christianity that flowed from it. This new fountain, in opposition to orthodoxy, was the human spirit's own self-reflection, self-exploration. In many ways the stage of knowledge at which the biblical writers lived was transcended. First, in secular matters, in astronomical and geographical knowledge, and the like. But, secondly — so it was set forth by Baumgarten, Semler, and others, in Germany, and by early deists in England — the religious views and teachings of biblical authors depend in a measure upon the character of their secular knowledge. 1 Instead of Protestantism freely developing by means of the friction of its various confessions, on the one hand, and its conflict with Socinianisra and Armin- ianism — i. e., initial rationalism — on the other hand, it narrowed itself all the more into a rigid finality, and became a spiritless, formal thing, an obstinate, controver- sial theology which failed only in speculative ability and ecclesiastical solidity of perfect similarity to mediseval scholasticism. Toward the end of the seventeenth century Pietism (Spener) was an effort to rejuvenate religion petrified in the strait-jacket of orthodoxy. But, founded on feeling for the most part, without solid scientific basis, dominated by scrupulosity and illiberality in the practical life. Pietism was not qualified to consummate the reformation. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that a new period of development was ushered in by the reawakened philological and historico-critical investigation — the impulse to which originated not from within, but from without the church, from new movoments oi tlie human spirit and new historical situations. 30 The Finality of the Christian Religion Therefore, if the latter required and was capable of rectifi- cation and perfectibility, it could not be otherwise with the former. In order for God to have given to the authors of the Old and New Testaments perfect religious concepts, he would have had to transform their other ideas, the rest of their knowledge, and thereby he would have contravened the law of his operations, discernible everywhere, namely, the law of successivity. These reflections were put forth by Semler, who, consequently, found in biblical revelation only the beginning of the true knowledge of Grod, capable of progressive perfectibility, i. e., development. Lessing, in his Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts,^ revived the Montanistic comparison of the various periods of revelation with the various stages of human life:^ the Old Testament period to Childhood, the New to Youth, the age of reason to Manhood. He defended the Old Testament against deistic attacks on the ground that its employment of rewards and punishments was characterized by the pedagogic wisdom with which a parent deals with a child. But he also held that the Old Testament was an elementary book beyond which the race had passed. According to Lessing, the New Testament was only a better book of the same kind, teaching the doctrine of immortality and future retribution, for exam- 1 " Education of tho Human Race." 2 It is remarlfable that in Lessing's day the theologian Teller independently returned to the same old mode of treating the subject ; for, according to Teller, Christianity has passed through several stages: a first and necessary child-age of unconditioned faith ; a second age of rational Christianity, for which the apostles afford the starting-point, which, however, afterward stopped half-way and misled many to unbelief; from these two, by means of progressive illumination — for man can never bo too much enlightened — the third stage of full knowledge and saving virtue was developed, a standpoint of manliness and majority which yet acknowl- edges the merits of the two antecedent epochs. Teller was not a deist, for he did not seek to pass back from the historical and positive to the natural, and did not seek, in that which precedes, historical revelation and development, but he permitted revelation to emerge through the historical process itself — and the above three stages of revelation are the form which his idea of the perfectibility of Christianity assumes. I may add that Teller's attention to the general subject is attributed by him to the scattered thoughts relating to the subject in Semler's writings. Historical Survey 31 pie, on which the Old Testament was silent, though the latter revealed the unity of God, But as the Old Testament had been outgrown, so also would the New Testament be^ not merely formally, by the transformation of revealed propo- sitions into truths of reason, but also materially, by the dis- covery of nobler incentives to virtue than the future rewards offered in the New Testament. In connection with this latter he found in the mediaeval idea of an eternal gospel more than mere, enthusiasm [Schwdrmerei). It will come, it will surely come, the time of consummation, when man, his understanding more and more convinced of an ever better future, will yet not have to borrow from that future the motive to conduct; when he will do the good because it is the good, not because arbitrary rewards are promised which shall rivet and strengthen his inconstant gaze — the inner reward is better. It will surely come, the time of the new, eternal gospel, which was promised us in the elemen- tary books of the New Covenant. Perhaps certain enthusiasts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had received a ray of this new, eternal gospel, and erred only in announcing its dawn so near. Perhaps their threefold age of the world was not such an empty vagary, when they taught that the New Covenant must become as antiquated as the Old had become.' The German Krug^ also wrote letters on the perfectibility of the Christian religion. The Christian religion as con- tained in the New Testament documents one cannot honor absolutely, he contended, as the ne plus ultra of religious and moral knowledge, without doing violence thereby to reason and even to Scripture itself; but one must accord to this religion necessity and capacity for further development. 1 Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, sees. 85-88. See Lessing's Werke, Vol. XII, pp. 368 ff. 2 Briefe ilber die Perfectibilitat der geoffenbarten Religion, pp. 10-83. See also Flatt, Ideen einer Perfectibilitat der gOttlichen Offenbarung, and Tiefteunk, Die Religion der MUndigen. 32 The Finality of the Christian Keligion And this not merely in the sense that the New Testament is to be more perfectly appropriated subjectively, both theoreti- cally and practically, by the individual Christian and by Christianity in its entirety, but also in the sense that the sum of religious and moral knowledge laid down in the New Tes- tament can and must be rectified objectively by means of further human reflection. According to Krug, there are both historical and philosophical reasons for this: philosophical, because an absolutely perfect revelation is not possible, and, if possible, would not be useful. Even Deity can communi- cate no absolutely perfect knowledge to man, because it must else transform a finite spirit into an infinite, or vio- lently hinder it from using communicated knowledge anew in order to the attainment of higher insight. Therefore, the concept of the absolute perfectibility of revealed religion contains a contradiction in itself ; a knowledge communicated at a given point of time cannot be absolutely perfect. More- over, that the communication of an unimprovable revelation, its possibility assumed, would yet not conform to the end of all religion, particularly the Christian, is easily shown. If instruction is to bring true help, it must be given according to the capacity of the scholar; consequently, it must pro- gress step by step with the scholar, as his capacities and knowledge gradually develop. Had Jesus really intended to establish a perfect and inviolable religious norm for all time — and here the philosophical reasons pass over into the historical — he would have had to set forth his teachings differently from what he did; not merely popularly and occasionally as he did, but also, at least to his most trusted disciples, as a definite and unified doctrinal formula. Add to this — so Krug continues — that the apostles increased in knowledge after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and that the Scriptures require criticism, and you have pure proof Historical Survey 33 that Jesus did not intend to set up a final, unchangeable religious theory — could not and would not. He was appointed by God to give the human spirit only the first impulse, as it were, to start it in further investigation con- cerning religious and moral objects. It is at this point that the Grerman Ammon^ took up the line of development. Ammon conceived this perfectibility of Christianity more definitely as the development of Chris- tianity into world-religion. He deals with the transforma- tions which it had to experience in its transition from exclusively Jewish soil to pagan, in its contact with Greek philosophy and German racial character, and the like. He urges that Christianity, even in its Protestant form, is by no means the same as the primitive Christianity of Christ. In all these changes he found progress to greater freedom, and he defined the task of the times in reference to Christianity to be the exalting of the ideal in Christianity more and more above the real and empirical, which hitherto had been made the main thing. Not the religion, but its doctrinal character, was changed thereby.^ With Schleiermacher reflection returns from the finality of the religion to the perfection of its Founder, as set forth in his discussion of the Person of Christ — the only dogma, in fact, which Schleiermacher's Olauhenslehre (dogmatics) contains. Aside from this dogma, there may be, indeed, valuable philosophy in his doctrine of God and of the world, and inestimable critical contribution in his dissolution of ecclesiastical doctrinal formulations ; but the really positive side of his work consists in what he elaborates concerning the Person of Christ. It would not be too much to say, indeed, that Schleiermacher's Christology is the last attempt, 1 Die Fortbildung des Christenthums zur Weltreligion, Vol. II, Part 2, pp. 221 ff. Ammon was a critical Kantian. ^Ibid. See also preface to Vol. I, pp. viii f. 34 The Finality of the Cheistian Religion worthy of note, to make the ecclesiastical Christ acceptable to the spirit of the modern world. And though at this point our historical survey threatens to encroach upon the subse- quent main body of our work, a brief reproduction of Schleiermacher's thought must here be given. Sec. 91 of his Glauhenslehre, being translated, is as follows : We have communion with God only in such a living communion with the Redeemer as that wherein his free activity displays his absolutely sinless perfection and blessedness And sec. 93: Since the self -activity of the new collective life' is originally in the Redeemer and issues from him alone, he as historical individual must be at the same time archetypal, i. e., the archetypal must be completely historical in him, and every historical moment^ of the same must contain the archetypal. As previously indicated, the writings hitherto under review gave free expressions concerning the perfectibility of revealed religion. But what precisely was to be understood as included under perfectibility was left in obscurity. It seemed to be the New Testament revelation in general. But, as said already, we have now come to a time when thought began to be directed to the consciousness of Christ. Is Christ's consciousness that beyond which it is impossible to pass ? It is in the discussion of this question that the powerful influence of Schleiermacher came to be felt. He urged the Urhildlichkeit, consequently the Uniihertreff- barkeit,^ of Christ. But Schleiermacher limited this Urhild- lichkeit to the religious region, to the God-consciousness of 1 J. e., the Christian community. 2 Of course, Schleiermacher uses "moment" here in its philosophical significa- tion. Perhaps I should add that the " archetypicalness " ( Urbildlichkeit) of Christ in Schleiermacher's system takes the place of "deity" of Christ in orthodoxy, and of For6Jid, " type," " model," " example," in rationalism, 3 " Unsurpassableness," HisTOKicAL Survey 35 Christ, in order to head off the assumption that by means of the Urhildlichkeit attributed to him he must have excelled in all the knowledge and capability which have been other- wise developed in human society. This position leaves room for the rectification of (if need be), and the advancement upon, Christ's views concerning nature and history, and also for progress in the adaptability of means in order to the actualization of his sentiments in the world. Schleiermacher further held — agreeing at this point with Hegel — that in matters religious the popular form of Christ's teachings and life can and should be surpassed. But this is only to tran- scend the temporal manifestation, not the essence, of his religion. Those temporal, and therefore limited, forms were not competent to embody the essence fully. Hence the more these forms were shattered and better ones put in their place, the more the essence would be exhibited in its origi- nal purity and Urhildlichkeit. With Urhildlichkeit Schleiermacher also affirmed the sinlessness of Jesus; that is, he identified the personified archetypal perfection of the historical person of Jesus with the idea {Idee) of sinless perfection. The Person of Christ is the actualization of the idea of human kind as such in its pure ideality. It is in this connection that we have Schleier- macher's famous regress from the work of Christ to his Person, or from the energy and constancy of God-conscious- ness in the Christian community to the essential sinlessness [Unsundlichkeit] and archetypal religious perfection of Christ. Schleiermacher apprehends the historical person of Jesus immediately as itself the personified idea of Chris- tianity, and then passes from the human perfection of Jesus to his absoluteness. One might formulate Schleiermacher's procedure as follows: Given Jesus as a full and real human being — as against the church's Christ with an abbreviated 36 The Finality of the Chkistian Keligion humanity; required to appropriate in a rational way those characteristics from the church's Christ which are necessary if he is to continue to be our divine redeemer and arche- type. This absoluteness, as set forth in Schleiermacher's Christology, is the last thread which fastens the modern to the old-church apprehension. But this is not the place to show that Schleiermacher's "Kedeemer" was not the "God- man" of the church, nor was he the historical Jesus of modern science — much as it is due to Schleiermacher that for the nonce Christ was viewed as a man in the full sense of the word, as modern culture demanded, and yet as divine Redeemer, object of faith and worship for all time, as tradi- tional piety desired. Historical criticism has corroded Schleiermacher's portrait of the Christ quite as thoroughly as his criticism disintegrated in principle the ecclesiastical portrait. Henceforth, critical elaboration of the historical life of Jesus is to be the test of the dogma of the Person of Christ. Schleiermacher's Christ is as little a real man as is the Christ of the church ; critical examination of the gospel brings us no nearer to Schleiermacher's Christ than it does to the church's Christ.^ But instead of thus anticipating, let us turn rather to Hegel's conception of the absoluteness of Christianity. Listening to many voices out of the past, and especially to Schelling out of the present, Hegel attempted, among other things, a speculative reproduction of the dogmas of the church. With these, and especially with Schelling, he sought to show how the Christian religion is related to the idea of divine immanence in the world. The Hegelian speculation combined two ideas which apparently exclude each other — 1 Still it is the imperishable merit of Schleiermacher to have made for our cen- tury the christological problem a specifically religious problem. His exposition of the doctrine of Christ's Person in sees. 93 £E. of his Glaubenslehre, where he says that "die stetige KrSftigkeit seines Gottesbewusstseins, welche fin eis-'fiitliches Sein Gottes in ihm war," is perhaps his most abiding contribution to theology. HiSTOEioAL Survey 37 "absolute" and "process." In the history of thought it had been the custom to conjoin "absolute" and "substance," "absolute" and "person," "absolute" and "principle;" but modern speculation has given us "absolute process." But that which is in process is spirit, and the essence of the absolute spirit is idea, thought. It is in the finite spirit that God arrives at a consciousness of himself,' first in unclear feeling, then in idea where the thought is still restricted to sensible pictures and images — i. e., religion in the form of popular metaphysics or of dogmas — finally in thought. In philosophy and religion there is the same con- tent: the unity of the absolute and the finite spirit. But Christianity is the religion in which this process of unifica- tion has attained its consummation, and is therefore the absolute religion — especially at the stage in which it is constructed into the absolute philosophy, which is Hegel's. The dogmas of the church are converted into metaphysical concepts. Thus the Hegelian philosophy looked for the truth of religion in logical and metaphysical categories rather than in the facts and experiences of feeling (Schleiermacher), and in volition (Kant). Corresponding to the centrality of the dogma of the incarnation of the divine Logos in Chris- tianity, we have the culmination of the self-actualization of spirit in humanity,^ iln Hegel's Phenomenologie— e. g., pp. 14, 15, 24 — his point is plainly this: The absolute is essentially resultant, is what it is, in fact, first at the end, and its nature consists in its self-becoming. The self-consciousness of the absolute Spirit is religion. Religion is the divine Spirit's knowledge of itself through the media- tion of the finite spirit. Thus — so one might conclude — religion in the last analysis is not an affair of man, but it is essentially the supreme determination of the absolute Idee itself, so far as it has to flnitize itself in order to become knowledge of its own self through this finitization. 2 That Pfieiderer's system deviates from, and in some ways is independent of, Hegel's, may be seen from the following: "As there is no essential relation between these metaphysical ideas and the person of Jesus, he is made arbitrarily, as anyone else might have been, an illustration and example of absolute idea to which he stands in no more intimate relation than the rest of the human race ; whereby the special historical importance of the originator of the Christian community, and of 38 The Finality of the Christian Keligion Finally Strauss appears upon the scene. Taking up Schleiermacher's Cliristology, he urges that from the stand- point of modern science valid considerations may be adduced against it. For one thing, it is hard to draw the line between what does and what does not belong to religion, in the claims of Jesus. The imperfection of his other knowledge — • knowledge physical, metaphysical, historical — his faith in anerels, demons, in a heaven above and a hell below — these views could not be held by Jesus, so Strauss thinks, without their exercising a corrupting influence even on what was peculiarly religious in his experience. For another thing, the ideality of Jesus for mankind in all time and space is impossible on the grounds of the particularity and historical conditionateness of Jesus as a man living in a given time and place. Furthermore, the sinlessness of Jesus is not only historically undemonstrable in the nature of the case, but inconsistent with the position, indispensable to the Chris- tian faith, that Jesus was a true and real man who passed through a true and real human development.' As against Hegel, Hegelian that he was, he maintained that the distinc- tion between an essence that would be something other than the totality of its phenomena is illogical ; and consequently the prerogative of being ne plus ultra for all time must be denied every historical personality without exception. "The idea," he says, thinking of Hegel, "does not shake out its full content in a single exemplar!" While Hegel in his Phenomenologie had professed his belief in the absoluteness of Christianity, he had also taught that the Christian spirit is only one form of the manifestation of the absolute spirit. the first model of its religious and moral life, is not only left without explanation, but is lost altogether — a result which not only does violence to the religious con- sciousness, but is unsatisfactory to historical science." — Pfleideeek, Introduction to Strauss, Life of Jesus, p. xviii. 1 See " Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte : Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher'schen Lebens Jesu," in Vol. V of Stkauss's Oesammelte Schriften. HiSTOEICAL SUEVEY 39 But in that case the absolute spirit could have like forms of manifestation after Christianity as well as before it. That such will not be the case dare not be assumed, Strauss said, but must be proved — proved "better than Hegel has done in his self- and system-contradictory designation of Chris- tianity as the absolute religion." Logically, Strauss closes the discussion of the problem in its old form. In 1871 he published the sad testament of his final thought, his last book. The Old Faith and the New. There Strauss exhibited Christianity in the form created by traditional dogma. Confounding Christian religion and ecclesiastical dogma — or, better, in oblivion to Christianity as religion of the spirit, of freedom and personality, treating the Christian religion as coincident with ecclesiastical authority-religion — he raised the question: "Are we still Christians?" and answered it in the negative.' And, as we shall see, if Strauss was right in his idea of Christianity, he was also right in his answer. In recent years the problem has been revived in theologi- cal Germany, where the writings and addresses upon the many phases of the subject, both scientific and religious, have been characterized by unusual intensity of feeling and breadth of scholarship. This revival of the discussion is due to the embarrassment into which apologetic theology has been precipitated by the aggression of religio-historical inquiry and the obtrusion of the religio-historical method into its work. That inquiry has stimulated a desire on the part of many for a new religion adapted to raze the decaying structure of the old faith. Others think that they have found a substitute for Christianity in Brahminism, or i"My conviction, therefore, is, if we would not evade difficulties or put forced constructions upon them, if we would have our yea, yea, and our nay, nay; in short,, if we would speak as honest, upright men, we must acknowledge we are no longer Christians."— r/ie Uld Faith and the New, p. 107. 40 The Finality of the Christian Keligion Buddhism, or " theosophical religion," or similar forma- tions. More important still, professional teachers of the church in Germany declare that, as the result of the religio- histori- cal labor of our time, the claim of Christianity to be the absolute, the true, the final religion, unsurpassable and in- comparable, is open to grave doubt. They compare Jesus, subsuming him under the category of "religious personal- ity," with all other geniuses of religious history. They apply the laws of religious development — laws discovered elsewhere — to Christianity and to the history of the reli- gious life mirrored in the Bible. And they conclude that all history is flux, is movement, development, and that religious history presents the picture of an incessant process of purifi- cation. Hence the claim of Christianity to be the climax and close of all is to be at least re-examined ; all the more so since every religion claims to rest on revelation, self -communication of Deity. Moreover, the culture of a country and age pro- foundly affects the religious life indigenous thereto. Per- haps, then, our modern cultural epoch also requires a new religion, or at all events a radical reformation of Christianity. Thus questions crowd anew upon German scholars. The work of religious history is disquieting. A weakening fear whether Christianity is the religion and Christ the one Savior, beside whom there is none other, has taken posses- sion of men's souls. Two ways of resolving the difficulty have suggested themselves to the bearers of the religious interests of Ger- many. The one is to contest the right of religious history in theology. It is more in accord with strength of faith and Christian self-certainty to say that Christianity is self- dependent, and must be understood out of itself, i. e., from the standpoint of Christianity. What Christianity, consid- HisTOEicAL Survey 41 ered as religion, signifies to our hearts, is independent of the religious historian, if not inaccessible to him. Not assailing the element of truth in this consideration, others see — and see rightly — that it yet does not follow that the theologian concerned with putting Christianity into right relations with the phenomena of our sciences and our civili- zations may be indifferent to the facts of religious history simply because they are embarrassing to his presuppositions. It would seem to amount to a practical surrender of the universal validity of Christianity, in the very moment of its theoretical defense, to conceive thus that it is not possible, with a good conscience, to hold to the superiority of the Christian religion to all others over and against the simple facts of religious history. It is only the unenviable pre- rogative of the Catholic church to close its eyes in this manner to those apologetic problems and burdens which God in his providence has laid athwart our path. But more heroic German scholarship has supported another way of approaching the difficulty. May we, per- haps, be able to forego the claim to the absoluteness of Christianity, and thus escape the whole problem? Can we not simply grant that Christ is one beside others, or, rather, primus inter pares; that "Christianity is the most vigorous, most concentrated, revelation of religious energy, among all religious upheavals" ?^ Do we thus sacrifice anything essen- tial to Christianity, or do we not thus do justice to its peculiarity which we cannot forego? As a matter of fact, we come here to the kernel of the question. Everything depends upon the meaning of the absoluteness^ or finality which we would vindicate to Chris- iTeoeltsch, op. cit., p. 77. 2 It was the fashion a generation or two ago among Unitarians to describe Christianity as the "absolute religion," on the foundation of the ancient command- ments interpreted in their universal sense as love to God and love to man. So Theodore Parker, e. g., contended. 42 The Finality of the Chkistian Religion tianity, of the necessary presupposition of the Christian faith in Christ in this connection; depends also upon what way we would secure to the results of religious history their rights in the matter. So the representatives of this second stand- point urge. In the constructive part of the present work the influence of their great debate will be detected by the well-informed theologian on every page, where arguments are reproduced and weighed, and an independent position, related now negatively, now positively, to their discussion, is reached, but not without grateful obligation to their learn- ing and leadership. A brief statement of the literary output of that debate may be of service to the reader. Professor Ernst Troeltsch, of Heidelberg, is the central figure and has shown most interest in the right of religio-historical work, as the title of his book indicates: Die Absolutheit des Christenthums und die Religionsgeschichte} He broached the subject in his previous writings: "Die christliche Weltanschauung und die Gegenstromungen,'" "DieSelbstandigkeit der Religion," and "Geschichte und Metaphysik."^ In the beginning of his development, Troeltsch was ready to grant with a good degree of confidence a Sonderstellung — /. e., a place by itself and apart — to Christianity in the total phenomenon of reli- gion; but, pressed by his opponents, especially by Professor Julius Kaftan, of Berlin, in his articles "Die Selbstandigkeit des Christenthums," and "Erwiderung: (1) Die Methode; (2) Der Supernaturalismus,"* he was subsequently on the point of abandoning the concept of absoluteness as "dog- matic." Nevertheless, he is now inclined again to maintain, and to seek to prove, that Christianity is the absolute religion.* 1 Tiibingen und Leipzig, 1902. ^Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche, 1893-94. 3 J6Jd., 1895-96, and 1898. ilbid., 1896 and 1898. ^ Theologischer Jahreshericht, Vol. XVIII, p. 510; Theologische Arbeiten des Rheinischen wissenschaftlichen Prediger-Verehis, N. F., Vol. No. 4, p. 103. HiSTOKicAL Survey 43 This fluctuation indicates the conscientiousness of the investi- gator who is ready to revise his position ever anew. It may also illustrate perhaps that one allows himself to be driven too far afield from connection with the collective Christian consciousness, when one alienates from Christianity its char- acter as absolute religion reposing on revelation. It would seem to be due to this feeling that other opponents have arisen against Troeltsch; e. g., Reischle/ "Historische und dogmatische Methode;" Traub,^"Die religionsgeschichtliche Methode und systematische Theologie," and Wobbermin,* "Das Verhaltnis der Theologie zur modernen Wissenschaft und ihre Stellung im Gesamtrahmen der Wissenschaft."* Mention should be made of the important discussions by Professor Harnack/ in his Die Aufgabe der theologischen Faculiaten unci die allgemeine ReligionsgescMchte/ Nieber- gall, TJeber die Ahsolidheit des Christenthums;^ Heinrici, Diirfen icir noch Christen hleihen?^ Adolf Jlilicher, Moderne Meimmgsverschiedenheiten iiber Methode, Aufgaben und Ziele der Kirchengeschichtej^ and Ihmels, Die Selbstdndig- keit der Dogmatik gegenuber der Religionsphilosophie. With the exception of Jtilicher, these, from different stand- points, are, with varying decisiveness, opponents of Troeltsch in the controversy. 1 Theologische Rundschau, 1901. 2 Zeitschrift fur Theologie und, Kirche, 1901. 3 Ibid. * Recently, Theologische Arbeiten der Bheinischen ivissenschaftlichen Prediger- Vereins, N. F., No. 5. 5 In criticism of Ha mack, J. Estlin Carpenter, in Christianity and the Religions of the World, p. 107, writes: " It is claimed for Jesus that he is net one master among many, but the Master; his religion is 'the religion,' or, as one might say, religion itself, final and complete. If this plea be preferred as a reason for neglecting the study of other great manifestations of the religious consciousness, because India or China can teach us nothing .... if it means that we are to turn our backs on Plato and ignore Wordsworth, it must be disowned. If it implicitly affirms that no seer to come may rise to still greater heights of insight or character, once more it must be rejected, for one cannot employ the achievements of the past to limit the possibilities of the future. 6 Giessen, 1901. ^ Tubingen und Leipzig, 1900. 8 Leipzig, 1901. 9 Erlangen und Leipzig, 1901. 44 The Finality of the Christian Eeligion Troeltsch's own contention may be summarily reproduced as follows: In chap. 1 he sets out with the question of the origin of the theory of the absoluteness of Christianity. Christianity has been drawn into the stream of religious evolution by modern historical science. Therefore efPort is made to safeguard the normative validity of Christianity as the perfect actualization of the concept of religion or as the "absolute religion." Thus the evolutionistic apologetics, as presented from different sides by Schleiermacher and Hegel, is closely related to the orthodox-supernatural apologetics. Chap. 2 gives a critique of this construction of Christianity as absolute religion. The basic concept is erroneous: a universal concept of religion is exalted to norm or ideal, and treated at the same time as impelling power in the historical life of the individual. This substitution has shown in its results that it is impossible. Moreover, the proof of an "absolute" realizing of the universal concept in historical development, especially in Christianity, which manifests itself in all its phases in historical particularity, has mis- carried. Besides, the concept, dominating this whole structure of thought, of a development, and of a unitary gradual development at that, causal and teleological at once, has proved to be equally false. But then, again, the eo ipso correct opposition to the universal concept and its employment as norm has only led many precipitately to erect concrete Christianity to the dignity of a norm for all religion. In the place of all these efforts, chap. 3 urges the full recognition of relativism, but also of its limitation at the same time. There is no objection to the expression — none to saying that Christianity is a "relative phenomenon," that it ever sustains definite historical relations. But we do not thus fall into boundless and aimless relativism. The thought of relativity by no means excludes a valuation Historical Survey 45 ( Wertung) of historical phenomena. Such valuation shows, however, that only a few great generic types of the spiritual, especially of the religious, life come into consideration as really worthful, or through which abiding values are won, but also that they can be subordinated to the idea of a com- mon normative goal, and may be considered as tendencies converging to such goal. The idea of development can be employed in this sense also. But in doing so one must forego the absolute actualization of the concept. Chap. 4 shows that, on the basis of this strictly historical mode of treatment, a justification of Christianity as the highest religious truth, valid for us, is possible. Comparison of various religions indicates that Christianity is the acme of previous religious history, at the same time being the point of convergence of all known developmental tendencies of religion. In this way it is made extremely improbable that it will ever be outclassed. Room is thus prepared for the faith, transcending science, that we really possess in Jesus Christ communion with God, and his salvation, and therefore are bound to him for all time. In what sense, then, may we speak of the absoluteness of Christianity? Chap. 5 is devoted to this question. Naive absoluteness is peculiar to the religious life. In the case of Jesus this naive absoluteness is nothing but the consciousness of his mission; in the case of the Christian, nothing but the consciousness of his uplift to fellowship with God. The Christian religion may rightly share this claim to absoluteness with other religions. But when one seeks to monopolize this claim to absoluteness, in opposition to claims of other religions, by the use of supernatural, rational, or evolutionistic views, one finds on his hands only an artificial product which collapses before the energy and rigor of historical science. These scientific authentications of an exclusive absoluteness must yield. What remains? 46 The Finality of the Christian Religion On the one hand, faith which surrenders with naive absolute- ness to the power of Jesus and lives in God through him ; on the other, scientific comparative religion, which, however, can accord to Christianity only the first place among the religions which have hitherto appeared upon the broad plain of human history. So Troeltsch. As Kaftan is the best-known opponent of Troeltsch, it may be desirable to reproduce the main features of his position. It is as follows: The gist of the controversy, he says, is as to whether the method and results of the science of religious history are compatible with the further judgment that Christianity is the only true religion. The controversy is not exactly new ; only there is a new way of employing religious history on the part of modern theology and phi- losophy of religion. The old dogmatic prepossession of the sole truth of Christianity is declared to be remedilessly undermined thereby. Kaftan makes two concessions, (a) The old view which knows only pagan error and idolatry besides Christianity (and Judaism) is not compatible with the findings of religious history, to which it is incumbent upon us to readjust ourselves. But we have Christian prece- dent for this. The ancient church saw in Hellenic philoso- phy a preparation for Christianity. So, similarly, we today may look upon the religious development of humanity from the positive point of view of a truth in process of becoming, and of a divine preparation. (6) It is further correct that the proposition, Christianity is the only true religion, does not admit of demonstration religio-historically ; just as little as, or even less than, it can be proved by mere historical means that Christianity is the highest form of religious life. But when it is said — Kaftan now taking the offensive — that the religio-historical method is competent to exclude Christianity from being specifically distinguished from all HiSTOEICAL SUKVEY 47 Other religions, it must be pointed out that this is an exaggeration. Other such exaggerated inferences have been wont to attach themselves to the advancement of scientific investigation. Thus, its advocates declare materialism to be the pure and necessary result of the natural-science method. Thus, too, there was a time when they believed that they could transform morality into a natural science on the basis of statistics. Common to all these contentions is the erroneous opinion that method of itself alone can deter- mine what is true and what is not. There is a tendency in many religions to refer their origin to a special revelation of deity. History makes this evident. And it belongs to the essence of Christianity to attach decisive importance to this circumstance in its own case. But does historical method require us to treat this that is common to all religion as an error to be relegated simply to psychology for explanation? Why not conclude, rather, that we have here an element of the religious life which points to a corresponding truth ? At all events, on the supposition that divine reason is the pilot of history and that religion is an integral factor of human life in history, such a conclusion is not to be set aside as a priori impossible. But religious history does not decide the question one way or the other. The question must be stated differently for those who acknowledge that Christianity is the climax of religious development. The question is whether this connection between Christianity and special divine revelation is not absolutely essential, that Christianity cannot be main- tained without this connection. And the answer is that specific appreciation of Christ as revelation and the peculiar- ity of the Christian religion belong together, stand and fall together. Rob revelation of its supernatural character, and it becomes stale, flat, and unprofitable. Christianity is the religion of a special revelation of God — that or nothing. 48 The Finality of the Christian Religion Christianity is restricted to divine revelation in Jesus Christ, and would not and could not be without it. Therefore it is the only true religion. So Kaftan. And there the matter may rest until we have seen the fortunes of supernaturalism and of rationalism before the judgment seat of history. PART I AUTHORITY-RELIGION (= SUPERNATURALISM) AND NATURALISM CHAPTER III THE FORMATION OF AUTHORITY- RELIGIOX 1. In real religion the desire for blessedness is always a desire for God who has revealed himself. Every religion cherishes the conviction that it has arisen from revelation of God. This revelation has been variously conceived: ethical and non-ethical, universal and particular. As to theories, there have been three ways of conceiving of this fundamental religious notion, all of which are open to grave objections: the traditionalistic, the rationalistic, the mystic ; though there is an element of truth in each of them. It is the tradition- alistic— that is, the ecclesiastical — conception of revelation with which we are mainly concerned in the discussion of Christianity defined as authority-religion. According to the traditionalistic apprehension, revelation is the tradition through which a series of ideas, as the content of the faith of pious men, has come down to us. More definitely, accord- ing to this view, revelation is the Bible. In this connection, therefore, it is my task to indicate briefly the church's pro- gressive reduction of revelation to the form and content of the biblical tradition. The universalistic side of the Pauline doctrine of revela- tion, with which we may as well begin, was stiU further developed in the old Greek church when, more and more, educated philosophic Greeks came to accept Christi- anity. John of Damascus,^ who in this point closed the Greek development of dogma, held that the knowledge of the existence of God is implanted in all men. The revelations of God in creation, in the Mosaic law, and in Christ ^Defide orthodox., 1, 1: "God did not leave us in absolute-ignorance. For the knowledge of God's existence has been implanted by Him in all by nature." 51 52 The Finality op the Christian Religion are all related to this natural idea of God only as an ascend- ing series of more powerful means of its reinforcement. Justin Martyr' and Clement^ of Alexandria taught that God permitted the divine Logos to descend on all men from the beginning. The whole human race is partaker of the Logos, so that all who live according to reason can be called Chris- tians— with this difference, however, that while the heathen have but scattered seeds of the Logos, the Christians have in Jesus the whole Logos. But now that the Christian revelation is offered to mankind, its believing acceptance is viewed as the only means of salvation ; hence a Christian particularism for the present grows up by the side of this universalism in reference to the past. The liberal view of a universal activity of the divine Logos was so altered that the Greek Fathers could refer the traces of the genuine knowledge of God among the heathen to the Jews, from whom they had appropriated it.^ Originally the proposition was that whoever in any age or among any people lived and taught according to reason were Christians. Now it is declared that whatever of good belonged to the heathen belongs to the Christians, for they are the heirs of the Jews.* 1 Justin, Apol., I, 46: "We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists ; as among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, etc. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without reason, were wicked and hos- tile to Christ, and slew those who lived reasonably." 2CLEMENT,Sfro»».,I, 7: "For the husbandman of the soil which is among men is one; He who from the beginning, from the foundation of the world, sowed nutritious seeds; He who in each age rained down the Lord, the Word." 3 "The Jews of Alexandria looked upon their own religion as a revealed philoso- phy resting upon the oracles of the Old Testament, to which all the wisdom of the Greeks was related either as borrowed or as a preparatory stage. For they either ascribed to the Spirit of God only the sacred writings of the Jews, in which case the Greeks must have stolen from them, or they allowed a certain activity of the divine reason in the Greek thinkers and poets, but proclaimed at the same time the supe- riority of the absolute revelation which has been granted to Moses."— Weknle, Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. I, p. 177. * Justin, Apol., I. 44: "And so, too, Plato, when he says, 'The blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless,' took this from the prophet Moses and uttered it. The Formation of Authority-Keligion 53 Time was when there was the same assumption of a universal and original revelation on the part of the old Latin church. To be sure, this revelation was viewed as ordinary and natural, rather than as the gift of the Logos, to which the extraordinary and the supernatural were later supplied. Tertullian assumes a knowledge of God which is independent of special revelation, and which belongs to the divine endowment of humanity, and is common, therefore, to all peoples. To establish the truth of Christianity, he appeals to the witness of the soul, which is naturally Christian. He says that all the essential principles of the Christian faith may be developed out of this soul, provided it has not been perverted by false philosophy.' Hence Chris- tianity, together with the whole Old Testament revelation, is only an institution which the gracious God has founded simply that men may be the more easily and surely saved.^ But here we have the entering of the wedge — this supply- ing of the extraordinary and supernatural to the ordinary and natural, that salvation may be facilitated. First, there was the great difficulty of attaining salvation prior to and apart from the addition of the extraordinary divine revelation to ordinary and natural. Then, at length, this difficulty became an impossibility in the judgment of the Western Church, For Moses is more ancient than all the Greek writers. And whatever both philoso- phers and poets have said concerning the immortality of the soul, or punishments after death, or contemplation of things heavenly, or doctrines of the like kind, they have received such suggestions from the prophets as have enabled them to under- stand and interpret these things." II 8,13: Speaking of the Greeks, "each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic Word, seeing what was related to it All the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them." See Baue, Christliche Gnosis, pp.526 £f. iTeetullian, Adv. Marcion., 1, 10: "The volume of Moses does not all initiate the knowledge of the Creator .... The greater part of the human race, although they knew not the name of Moses, much less his writing, yet knew the God of Moses .... From the beginning the knowledge of God is the dowry of the soul. .... God has for his witness this whole being of yours." 2 Tertullian, Apol., 18: But, that we might attain an ampler and more authoritative knowledge at once of Himself, and of His counsels and will, God has added a written revelation," etc. 54 The Finality of the Cheistian Religion all the more so with the development of the doctrine of sin as brought in by the fall of Adam and inherited by his descendants, Pelagius held, in a way, to an inner, consequently univer- sal, revelation,' to which the special Christian revelation was supplied as auxiliary. Against this — against posse non peccare and liber um arbitrium — Augustine affirmed the necessity of external revelation and of the agency of the Holy Spirit in order to the appropriation of this revelation. Fallen man had no revelation in his heart till one was donated him from without, and no ability to lay hold of the revelation, and hence the Holy Spirit must apprehend it for him.^ The church was custodian of both revelation and Spirit. To be sure, this theory was formulated in the interest of the absolutism of the church. But the conse- quent limitation of revelation in time and place is evident. It is an absolute supernaturalism, which we have here both on the objective and the subjective side: on the objective side, revelation is anti-historical; on the subjective, anti-psycho- logical. There is a botany, said to be valid in certain countries, according to which the Great Spirit, having created the trees of the forest, comes in the night each spring and sticks the leaves and blossoms on the branches. So, according to Augustine, the great human tree, blasted by sin, grows nothing from within that is divine; revelation is external, particularistic, miraculous ; and only such revelation saves. And this Augustinian position recurs in Scholas- ticism. The thought of Thomas Aquinas on the subject is complex and elaborate. He held that we knew some things concerning God and salvation through the reason, but even these are included in revelation, on which account iQne of the charges against him at the Synod of Carthage was that he taught: "Quoniam at ante adventum Domini fuerunt homines impeccabiles, i. e., sine peccato." '^ De gratia Christi,2o. The Foemation of Authority-Religion 55 alone one may rely upon them. Other truths — e. g., Trinity — transcend the range of reason and are accessible only in the church on the ground of revelation; that is, authority. But reason has a function in regard to the truths of revela- tion, as revelation has a function in regard to the truths of reason; for while revelation gives validity to the truths of reason which the latter is not capable to accord, reason, incompetent indeed to prove in this region, may yet refute objections raised against the dogmas of revelation.' The more rigidly the reformers clung to the dogma of hereditary sin, the more importance they had to attach to special or particular revelation as the only means of salva- tion. According to the Formula of Concord, the human reason since the fall was entirely blind in spiritual things; that is, in matters relating to religion and morality. It was unable to know anything in this region in its own strength. Hence it was clear that the way of salvation was not to be found without special revelation.^ Calvin, however, claimed that there was a natural consciousness of God in fallen man, but only in the form of feeling. "We lay it down as a position not to be controverted, that the human mind, even by natural instinct, possesses some sense of a Deity." ^ Still Calvin goes on to urge that this natural revelation does not suffice. But, however men were chargeable with sinfully corrupting the seeds of divine knowledge, which, by the wonderful operation 1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol., p. I, Qu.,1, Art. 1: "Ad eaetiam, quaededeo ratione humana iavestigari possunt, necessarium fuit, hominem instrui revelatione divina, quia Veritas de Deo per rationeminvestigata a paucis et per longum tempus et cum admisione multorum errorum homini proveniret. Necessarium igitur fuit praeter philosophicas disciplinas, quae per rationem investigantur, sacram doctri nam per revelationem haberi." His point is further worked out in Summa cath.fld. contra Gentiles, I, 4. See also American Journal of Theology, October, 1900, p. 680 2 "Concerning this matter, the following is our faith, doctrine and confession to wit : that the understanding and reason of man in spiritual things are wholly blind, and can understand nothing .by their proper power," etc. See Sohaff, Creeds of Christendom, Vol. Ill, p. 107. 3 Institutes, I, 3, 1. 56 The Finality of the Chkistian Eeligion of nature, are sown in their hearts, so that they produce no good and fair crop, yet it is beyond doubt, that the simple testimony magnificently borne by the creatures to the glory of God, is very insufficient for our instruction. For as soon as a survey of the world has just shown us a deity, neglecting the true God, we set up in his stead the dreams and phantasms of our own brains; and confer on them the praise of righteousness, wisdom, goodness, and power, due to him. ^ We need an assistance other and better than natural revela- tion to direct us to the Creator of the world, he says. Zwingli also ascribes to human reason a knowledge of God, but only of the existence of God, not of his nature. Many wise men have independently attained to a knowledge of the existence of God, but a knowledge of his nature is possible only through God's special revelation. The Socinians occupied a singular position. They denied hereditary sin, which to the mind of the orthodox party made special revelation necessary. But they also maintained rigid- ly the necessity of special revelation, denying the possibility of natural religion, and deriving all knowledge of God from external revelation. This Socinian standpoint grew out of a skeptical view of the human cognitive faculty. It is largely true that in this system religion was only an external, and by no means essential, addendum to morality. It holds that the feeling of right and wrong is innate in every man, and whoever follows this feeling is obedient to God, though he may never know or think that there is a God. The orthodox theologians of the seventeenth century^ com- bined and systematized with architectonic genius the previous development of the doctrine of revelation into more accurate and rigid definitions. They carefully distinguished between natural revelation and revelation of God in the narrower sense, i. e., supernatural revelation through the Bible. The latter was defined as that external act of God in which he disclosed him- 1 Institutes, I, 5, 15; see also I, 5, 1. ^E. g., Quenstedt, Hollaz, Gerhardt. The Formation of Authority-Religion 57 self in his book for their saving instruction. A.nd there was salvation in no other way. Particular revelation meant the damnation of those who did not have it. As for the Catholic there was no salvation outside of the church, so for Protestant orthodoxy there was no salvation apart from the revelation of the Book. And saving revelation and the Book were coinci- dent. The Book is thus the basis of authority-religion. And thus also the process by which saving revelation suffered pro- gressive reduction to the literature of the Bible was concluded. The Book as a whole, distinctionless, became divine author- ity in all matters of faith and practice. And revelation is a supernatural communication of doctrines guaranteed to be divine by the miraculous mode of their origin.' 2. Of the proof of divine revelation little need be said at this point. In the period and process of the formation of authority-religion appeal was made to miracle and prophecy as proof. And of these two, main dependence was put upon prophecy, defined as prediction. In the early church many were convinced of the divinity of Christ, for example, on account of the agreement of so many ancient and particular predictions of the Old Testament about him, as well as on account of his own fulfilment of his own prophecies. But in the first Christian centuries difficulty was felt with this proof, inasmuch as both miracles and prophecies were possible through demoniac powers. It was on this account that more definite criteria were necessary to distinguish true divine miracles and prophecies from the demoniacal. The moral character of the prophets and workers of miracles, and the beneficent design and effect of their doctrines and deeds, were declared to constitute the touchstone required. But effort was made to distinguish true miracle and 1 Whereas we now see that revelation is not the mechanical communication of a message from without, but the opening of the inner nature of specially prepared men to receive indications of the will of God in their own moral nature and in the world. 58 The Finality of the Christian Keligion prophecies, not only from the demoniacally supernatural, but also from the works of nature and natural predictions. To be sure, only a few of the earlier ecclesiastical writers attempted these more accurate definitions. The author of the Clementine Homilies held only those predictions to be divinely inspired prophecies which could not be otherwise accounted for. Augustine held that miracle was only rela- tive and subjective, and denied that there was any such thing as absolute miracle. He set up as criteria of mira- cle only («) the unusual or the extraordinary or the excep- tional, and (6) the astonishment or wonder of the person who perceives the phenomenon.' It was the Scholastics who first sharply defined miracles in a way that would serve authority- religion. A phenomenon does not become a miracle, they urged, from the circumstance that its cause is unknown to this person or that, or that it cannot be explained by refer- ence to some particular law of nature ; but a miracle is a phenomenon whose cause is absolutely unknown to all, and which cannot be explained by reference to all the forces lodged in the whole creation.^ Finally, miracles and predictions were held to be attestations of revelation not only by the Protestant state churches, but by all the so-called dissenting bodies as well. If anything, more emphasis is placed upon miracles as proofs in Protestant orthodoxy than in Catholicism.^ 1 Augustine, De utilitate credenti, 16, See Pfleideeer, Grundriss der chrtst- lichen Glaubens- und Sittenlehre, 3d ed., p. 100: "The naive faith in the reality of miracles, extra-biblical as well as biblical, which the church shared along with the whole of antiquity, rested on the poetic supernaturalism of the antique view of the world, which Augustine brought to dogmatic expression in the two-edged formula that, since the will of God is one with the nature of things nothing willed of God can be against nature, and therefoie miracle is merely against known nature." 2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol., 1, 105, 7. 3 Throughout this development we see the intellectualistic apprehension of mira- cles. Their ethico-religious value was not seen until the function of myth, legend, sagas, poesy in the history of religion had been recognized. The "miracle" may be baarer of divine revelation without having anything to do with "law" and its "yiolation." The Foemation of Authority-Religion 59 3. But it is not enough that the revelation be proved; it must be preserved. Revelation that saves was the immediate possession of but few men, even among its contemporaries, since it was individual divine communication in a given time and space. For the after- world it would be entirely lost, if some institution was not hit upon to hand it down. God's revelation was in documents of a dead past. The church canonized and interpreted them; and it did both, if in appearance historically, yet in fact dogmatically, according to the status quo of doctrine and practice in the early non- heretical churches, the most important of which were founded by the apostles themselves. But original revelation was also preserved and perpetuated through extra-canonical tra- dition. This unwritten tradition was a source of redemptive truths for the Catholic church. These traditions came to be divided into three classes: divine, ecclesiastical, apostolic. Divine traditions were such doctrines and practices as were communicated by Christ and his apostles, but were not to be found in the Scriptures. Apostolic traditions are such defi- nitions as were made by the apostles with the co-operation of the Holy Spirit, but are not contained in the epistles. Ecclesiastical traditions are such customs as have little by little come to have the power of law in the church. This last covered the abuses against which Protestantism rebelled, and which formed the outer occasion for the ultimate Protes- tant delimitation of the saving revelation to canon of Scrip- ture alone. The canon of Scripture was Word of God. Hence divine dignity belonged to it. Consequently, in relation to eccle- siastical development in history on the one hand, and to human thought and speculation on the other, it had norma- tive and judicial power. The Scripture was "Word of God" — that is, revelation — in such a way that the two are interchangeable, identical. Consequently a thing could no 60 The Finality of the Chkistian Keligion more be Word of God if it did not belong to the Sacred Scriptures than something could belong to the Scriptures which was not Word of God. By virtue of the latter, the Scriptures must be pure and free from all mere human constituents; by virtue of the former, "integrity" belongs to the Scriptures ; i. e., nothing that has ever belonged to the Word of God has been lost in history. Nor is there need of any other Word of God outside of the Bible. Hence the Bible must be "sufficient," and universally intelligible in all matters pertaining to salvation — i. e., "perspicuity" was affirmed,^ 4. From the foregoing it appears that ecclesiastical tradition and the Sacred Scriptures are the channels through which the divine revelation of redemption, communicated to certain individuals in ancient times, flowed to later genera- tions. As a consequence, two questions arose : Were those channels so solid and tight that nothing of their content could go to waste in the passage? and. Were they so pure that nothing alien to the content could mingle with it? This would be too much to expect, were they mere human agencies to which the divine content was intrusted. The need here may be illustrated from the modern effort to recover the empirical Jesus of history. Through textual criticism a pure text is sought from among manifold variants. From among the gospels one, say Mark, is assigned priority and primacy. We then pass from the gospel back to its documentary sources, from these to the traditions on which they rest, and finally from tradition to the facts. But the integrity and purity of the revelation are jeopardized from the very beginning. For even an eye- and ear-witness of lit may be added that Protestants denied and Catholics affirmed the canonical dignity of the Apocrypha ; that Protestants placed equal value on the Old and the New Testaments ; that the Socinians held that the Old Testament could be dispensed with and put a graded valuation upon its different parts, willing to accord to the Old Testament an historical rather than a dogmatic value. The Foemation of Authokity-Religion 61 the words and deeds of Jesus would, if left to his own intellectual power, fail to catch all in that initial apprehen- sion, and of that which he did apprehend much would appear in a subjective light, and all would be modified in the very apprehension by what the mind supplies in the activity of appropriation. Then in the course of time something would be obliterated from the memory of this witness, and much would suffer transformation again accord- ing to his own spiritual bent or his theoretical point of view. And upon occasion of oral and written reproduction, imper- fection and peculiarities of exposition would lead to further corruption of the content. Thus, supposing that the eye- and ear-witness was not a writer, but that the tradition was orally propagated for a generation or two, all these additions and subtractions and changes and transformations would increase more and more. Therefore, if the content of this revelation — without which, by hypothesis, no man could be saved — was to be passed on by Scripture and tradition undi- minished and uncorrupted to the after- world, it was necessary for God to do something more than merely to give this con- tent to humanity and then leave it to make its own way through history. He must care for its encasement in a form. He must give ideas and words. He must in very fact speak through the prophets and in Christ. He must write through evangelists, and he must make decisions through bishops and popes. In short, he must supply to revelation the infalli- bility of the church and the inspiration of the Scriptures. According to Catholic teaching, the church cannot err in her exposition of the doctrines of faith and practice, since she is guided by the Holy Spirit.' And it is not merely in absolutely essential matters that she cannot err, but also in other things which she prescribes to be believed and done, 1 Catech. Rom., 1, 10, 18 : " ecclesia errare non potest in fidei ac morum disciplina tradenda, cum a spiritus aneto gubernetur." 62 The Finality of the Christian Religion whether they be contained in the Scriptures or not.* If one asks where this infallible church is to be sought, the answer was : In the totality of believers and bishops. Yet their universal agreement is but an ideal. In reality the answer comes to be: A majority of believers and bishops, especially when the latter are convened in synods in order to oppose the corruption of the faith on the part of heretical minor- ities. Councils, especially ecumenical, have always arro- gated to themselves the guidance of the Holy Spirit ; and in modern times their infallibility, which Athanasius and Augustine did not acknowledge, has become the prevalent view in the church. But the contingency of this note showed itself, for example, in the Arian controversy. In many synods as large as those which were later esteemed orthodox, and not less legal, the Arian party conquered, and yet the decisions of such synods were not acknowledged subsequently by the church. Furthermore, when later all ecclesiastical power came to be more and more concentrated in the Roman bishop, as the development went on, the popes fell into contradiction, partly with themselves, partly with the great Reformation synods of the fifteenth century. Luther and other reformers appealed to this fact of history in order to prove the unfitness of the bishops in matters of ecclesiastical doctrinal authority, even apart from the proof drawn from the content of synodal and papal decisions. All the more was the infallibility of the Scriptures insisted upon, of which Catholic ecclesiastical infallibility was but a con- tinuation. Finally, as the way out of this whole difficulty, disclosed by a study of the history of councils, bishops, and iBellaemin, De eccl. milit., 14: "Nostra sententia est, ecclesiam absolute non posse errare nee in rebus absolute necessariis, nee in aliis quae credenda vel facienda nobis proponit, sine habeantur expresse in scriptura, sine non . . . , et cum dicimus, ecclesiam non posse errare, id intelligimus tam de universitate fidelium, quam episcoporum, ita ut sensus sit ejus propositionis : ecclesia non potest errare, i. e. id quod tenent omnes fideles tanquam de fide, et similiter id quod docent omnes episcopi tanquam ad fidem pertinens, necessario est verum et de fide." The Foemation op Authority-Religion 63 popes, the infallibility of the pope alone was declared. It was easier for him to be unanimous with himself.^ Turn now to the formation of the doctrine of the inspira- tion of the Scriptures. While the theory was excogitated on Protestant soil, the idea, common indeed to all ancient peoples, is pagan in origin. Everywhere its purpose has consistently been to exclude the activity of the human in order to insure the immediate divinity of the oracle. Even according to the Scriptures, it is God who spoke by the mouth of the prophets.^ The words of holy men did not issue from their own will, but from the impulse of God's spirit.' Therefore the Scriptures are inspired by God, and of course verbally.* The disciples on trial were not to think what they should say; it would be given them.^ Similarly, the ancient church assumed that the Old Testament was in- spired, and when a New Testament arose, it was thought to be inspired also by the Spirit or the Logos. This inspira- tion belonged even to the historical books of the Bible. Even in very ancient times, however, some difficulty was felt as to the historical writers in the Bible — the lack of the Holy Spirit working through them, Luke's explicit self-depend- ence, troubled the Fathers. Moreover, some of the Fathers inconsistently distinguished different degrees of inspiration in the Scriptures. For example, Origen, under Greek influ- ence, conceived that the biblical writers wrote according to their own power of comprehension and memory, and turned 1 A recent sidelight upon the pope's own feeling as regards his infallibility may be found in an article by a distinguished Roman Catholic scholar and cleric, in the Indepe7ident of January 28, 1904, p. 198. In explaining the late pope's refusal to condemn Loisy's book, he says: "Perhaps the dead pontifE remembered how he had been fooled into signing the document which declared the three witnesses of First John authentic. It is an open secret that when that decree came out Cardinal Vaughan hurried off to Rome and saw the pope. On learning how the scholarly world, as well as the early Fathers, rejected the text as spurious, Leo XIII declared that Mazella, the Jesuit cardinal, had deceived him by saying the disputed text was in the Fathers. Leo XIII would not have his fingers burned a second time." 2Actsl:16; 4:24; c/. Matt. 1 : 22 ; 2:15. 32Peter 1:21. *2Tim. 3:16. 5 Matt. 10:19, 20. 64 The Finality of the Cheistian Religion away from the letter and single word, to which the truth was not bound, to the universal truth of their writings. Moreover, in the Middle Ages we find, along with traditional strict views, very free judgment concerning inspiration. The Renaissance, too, brought more liberal views of the Scriptures, as of other literary survivals of antiquity. And Luther, as is well known, found much that was unprofitable, human, and transitory in the Old Testament, and he declared that the New Testament was of very unequal value. As for the latter, he said that the epistle of James was an epistle of straw, irreconcilable with Paul, and he had little use for the Revelation and Hebrews; while in his controversy with Zwingli he rigidly adhered to the letter, "Hoc est corpus meum." So we see at once literal inspiration and most liberal looseness in Luther's idea of inspiration. Zwingli tended to the position of the equal binding authority of all parts of Scripture. Calvin would treat the whole Bible as if God spoke immediately from heaven.' But the historical situation of Protestantism came to be a difficult one. The authority of the church had been renounced, and if the human spirit needed an external author- ity, as came to be supposed, only the Bible remained. But the Bible was no absolute authority, such as their Catholic opponents enjoyed, if a single word could be doubted. To discriminate between the Old Testament and the New Testa- ment, as Luther did, and to grade the New Testament — to distinguish between human and divine elements, between what was binding and what was not — is to introduce the disturbing factor of subjectivity, and is tantamount to admit- ting that the Bible is not an external regulative power of an absolute kind. No limits can be set to the critical imder- standing in that process of valuation. And it was the rec- ognition of these facts that consistently led from Luther of 1 Institutes, I, 7, 1. The Formation of Authority-Religion 65 the sixteenth to Quenstedt and others of the seventeenth century. It was different with the Catholics. They accorded regulative authority to tradition and church along with the Scriptures ; hence they could neglect things that were in the Scriptures. Indeed, not the Scriptures, but the church, enjoyed primacy. The Protestants, however, would build all on the Scriptures, while it might be to the interest of the Catholics to emphasize the mixed character of the Scriptures.' As indicated above, no real theory of inspiration was elaborated till Prot-estant orthodoxy. Still it may be well to repeat that the historical basis of the theory is the bibli- cal view of the prophetic inspiredness. As in heathen man- tic art, so in Hebrew prophecy, the receiver of the revelation is passive. The New Testament idea is not different. Every- thing which is written i-s inspired of God, and is profitable.^ The biblical idea of the inspiration of the biblical books was transferred by the rising church from the Old Testament to the New Testament not later than the end of the second cen- tury. All the time the presupposition is the formal divine authority of "Word of Bible," but without having developed a formal inspiration theory. Even the period of the Reformation knew none. It simply uncritically presupposed the divine origin of the Scriptures and the infallible authority of their doctrines. It was a long time after the consumma- tion of the identification of "Word of Bible" and "Word of God" before the rise of a formal theory concerning the ori- gin of the biblical books, and still longer before this theory iBellaemin, De tJer6o div., 1, 15: "Aliter Deus adfuit prophetis, aliter histo- ricis. Illis revelavit f utura et simul adstitit, ne aliquid falsi admiscerent in scribendo ; his non semper revelavit oa, quae scripturi erant, sed excitavit duntaxat, ut scriberent ea, quae vel viderant, vel audierant, quorum recordabantur, et simul adstitit, ne quid falsi scriberent, quae assistentia non excludebat laborem." 2 The whole so-called "pneumatic" interpretation of Scripture, which har- monizes the contradiction between the biblical letter treated as divine authority and the new religious consciousness, is connected indissolubly with this idea. 66 The Finality of the Christian Keligion attained its dogmatic conclusion. But this identification of "Word of God" and Sacred Scripture led necessarily to the formation of the orthodox inspiration theory, according to which the antique and biblical ideas of divine inbreathing were accentuated. In particular, the inspiration of persons was supplanted by inspiration of books, which, in origin, con- tent, and form, were referred to the absolutely supernatural activity of the Holy Spirit, in a way that excluded all human participation of the biblical authors apart from the mere mechanical business of writing. The theory in its details is as follows : (a) That the sacred writers were moved to write at all was due to the divine impulse and command, i. e., im- pulsus ad scrihendum; (6) in the next place, what they should write was given them by the Holy Spirit, i. e., sug- gestio rerum; (c) in addition, the form and manner of the writing were from the Spirit, i. e., suggestio verhorum. The immediate divine inspiration of matter and words — without distinguishing between dogmatic and historical, moral and geographical, and without caring whether the writers under- stood what they wrote or not — this came to be the orthodox church doctrine. In oral proclamation the human instru- ments furnished only the tongue, in the written only the pen; therefore God alone is the author of the Book.^ To be sure, difficulties suggested themselves. One such was due to the unity of authorship and diversity of style and exposi- tion. But this difficulty was resolved by the supposition that the Holy Spirit accommodated himself to the stage of culture and to the individuality of each writer; that is, the 1 Such a theory was indispensable to the Protestant opposition to the Eoman Catholic church. If word of Scripture and teachini? of church are set over against each other as word of God and word of man, then all active human participation in the origin of Scripture must be absolutely excluded. If the Scripture is in any least possible particular word of man, it is no longer absolute authority. Therefore, the orthodox doctrine of inspiration answered a question of life and death for ortho- doxy, and answered it in the only way it could be answered in order to keep intact the thesis of the absolute authority of the Bible. Subsequent gradual departure from the theory has carried with it at the same time the gradual dissolution of orthodoxy. The original orthodoxy is the only consistent orthodoxy. The Formation of Authority-Religion 67 Holy Spirit let each writer choose such words as the writer would have chosen had he been left to himself. But this was to get out of one difficulty only to fall into another, inasmuch as the inspiration of the words was endangered by such a supposition. In view of this difficulty, it was at length admitted that inspiration of words was subordinate to that of idea. Still another dangerous point was connected with blemishes of style, not in keeping with the divine dignity, since the Old Testament was not written in pure Hebrew, nor the New in pure Greek. The older dogma- ticians tried to avert the danger by the most artificial dis- tinctions and the most violent makeshifts. But one could not stop with inspiration of words as such ; for words, since they are composed of letters, could not be inspired if letters were not. Hence the discovery that tlie Hebrew vowel-points were not as old as the consonants of the text was another great embarrassment. Learned con- tradiction was undertaken, the nerve of the proof being an argumentum e silentio. Moreover, the equal age of vocals and consonants was accepted in the Helvetian Formula, Canon 2. But this was only the beginning of the danger which threatened the ecclesiastical theory of inspiration from the side of textual criticism. For, supposing the text had been divinely given verbally, even literally, to the writers, what guarantees that the text was thereafter accurately copied ? Critical labors brought to light thousands of dissimilarities and variations in the different codices. Thus the work of the Holy Spirit in inspiring the Scriptures was exposed to frustration through the factors of human weakness and care- lessness. The fallible human spirit, to whom one sought to give an infallible guide in the Scriptures, was thus set up as judge again concerning that Scripture in listing the divers readings. Nothing remained for the church but to choose one of the horns of a dilemma: either to hold on to the 68 The Finality of the Christian Religion textus receptus as divinely inspired, and to declare that the miracle of inspiration was repeated through a series of tran- scripts during the Christian centuries ; or to accept the results of criticism, and, in that case, the consequences which flow from criticism. But the church declined to choose. The way out at first was rather to deny the fact in question. The Reformed church did this in the Helvetian Formula. Then there also arose the question of lost books to be considered, and the policy was to affirm that many of them were in fact in the canon as constituents of other books; or to declare that, if they were lost, they were not sacred books, or at least they were not sacred for all time ; or to declare that, if they were sacred, they were not canonical; e. (/., Paul's letter to Laodicea. So much as regards subtractions from the canonical books. But what if there be additions, i. e., books not genuine? Conditions were not yet ripe for our later prob- lem of the authenticity of biblical books. The question was not, Are the Scriptures authentic? but. Are they inspired? What does it matter as to the human writer on the hypothesis of their divine authorship ? Early Protestant theologians had no need to set out, as in more modern times, from the veracity of the authors or the srenuineness of the writing, in order to prove the divinity of the Scriptures. Such considerations, together with others, such as the excellence of content, the sublimity of expression, even miracles and prophecies, estab- lished according to them a mere human faith, a moral proba- bility which, however great, could never become absolute certainty, i. e., divine faith. Calvin, in particular, warned the church against building faith in the divine word upon the sand of human reasons and conclusions. It is true that if we were inclined to argue the point, many things might be adduced which certainly evince, if there be any God in heaven, that he is the Author of the Law, and the Prophets, The Fobmation of Authority-Religion 69 and the Gospel. Yet it is acting a preposterous part to endeavor to produce sound faith in the Scriptures by disputations/ According to Catholics, the rock upon which faith in the Scriptures should be built was the church, the last court of appeal. But the fundamental presupposition of Catholicism — namely, the divinity of the church — was rejected by Protestants. On the other hand, according to the correct insight of those old theologians, Calvin especially, rational proofs drawn from miracles, fulfilment of prophecy, excellence of doctrine, still more so from antiquity and genuineness of the writings, yielded only probability. Besides, such mode of proof was but to make — contrary to the formal principle of Protestantism — the human reason the last court of appeal concerning the Scriptures. But if neither church nor reason suffices, whereon shall we build our faith in the Scriptures ? As if, so the answer ran, any far-fetched proofs, either from the church or the reason, were needed! This is just as if one should inquire. How shall we learn to distinguish light fi'om darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? For the Scripture exhibits as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things of their taste.^ But what is this but (a) to set up a highly subjective crite- rion, and (6) to leave the ultimate decision to fallible man, to whose nature just this feeling belongs ? Neither the one nor the other, Calvin replies. Religion appearing, to profane men, to consist wholly in opinion, in order that they may not believe anything on foolish or slight grounds, they wish and expect it to be proved by rational argimients, that Moses and the prophets spake by divine inspira- tion. But I reply that the testimony of the Spirit is superior to all reason. For, as God alone is a sufficient witness of himself in his own word, so also the word will never gain credit in the hearts I Institutes, I, 7, 4. 2 ibid., I, 7, 2. 70 The Finality of the Christian Keligion of man, till it be confirmed by the internal testimony of the Spirit. It is necessary, therefore, that the same Spirit, who spake by the mouths of the prophets, should penetrate into our hearts, to convince us that they faithfully delivered the oracles which were divinely entrusted to them.* So, then, this feeling that the divine word is true is nothing human, hut is itself divine. It is not our spirit that assures us of the truth of the Scriptures, but that same divine Spirit by which the Scriptures were inspired. If the divine Spirit speaks in our hearts, then we no longer believe on the foreign authority of the church, nor on the authority of our own understanding or feeling, both of which are untrust- worthy, but on the authority of the "internal testimony of the Holy Spirit," to which we subject our judgment. Still, in those hours when the divine witness is weak within us, proofs of probability may serve as reinforcement. Here, then, the orthodox system seems to have found a rock on which it could firmly rest, independent equally of fallible church and fallible reason. But it is precisely at this point that the feet begin to slip and the position is lost, never to be recovered again. For, on the one hand, the Pietists and Quakers — e. g., Barclay — pointed out that if it is an inner revelation of the divine Spirit whereby the Scrip- ture is first known as divine, then it is not the Scripture, but just that inner loorking of the divine Spirit, which is the last court of appeal. On the other hand, the rationalists, more dangerously, showed how the orthodox system transcends itself at this point; for if it is the inwardly felt witness of the Spirit which makes me certain of the divinity of the Bible, then it requires but little reflection to give rise to a further question: Who guarantees to me that this feeling in me, which yet is, by hypothesis, not of me, originates from the working of the divine Spirit ? Between the Bible 1 Institutes, I, 7, 4, The Formation of Authority-Religion 71 and the human spirit is introduced this tertium quid, the divine Spirit, witnessing in the latter of the former. But who witnesses to the divinity of this witness ? Either, only itself again, but that is to say, no one; or, something, be it feeling, be it thought, in the human spirit, thus according primacy to the latter. 5. Supposing that the divine revelation, from its home in the distant past, has been conveyed to us in its perfection and purity, by means of Sacred Scripture, still it must be further brought into us, if it is to save us. Now, it is by means of interpretation that we appropriate its contents. Interpre- tation, as seen from its history, is of two kinds : ecclesiastical and scientific. The latter inquires as to the character of the writing to be interpreted ; the former knows this beforehand, knows that it is a sacred divine writing, and on this account knows also that it will find nothing in it as a whole that is not true and worthy of God the author. The latter judges of an author after it has interpreted him ; the former, before, assuming that the worth of the book has been predetermined. According to ecclesiastical interpretation, which clings to the idea of the divine worthiness of all that is canonical, true understanding of a passage is not attained so long as an edify- ing content is not reached. But what if, as a matter of fact, there is no such edifying content, but just the opposite? In all such cases, histori- cally, two possibilities were at the option of the interpreter: if he occupied the author's standpoint in religion and moral- ity, in spirituality and culture, in stage and tendency, then all was found to be edifying and worthy of God as it stood ; but if the interpreter was on a higher moral plane, or was different in culture from the author, then he was offended at the unedifying passage, and the offense was removed by what a man of science would adjudge to be violent interpretations. It was the allegorical method which was thus made to cover 72 The Finality of the Christian Religion a multitude of sins — the pneumatic method of interpretation is but a slight modification of the same thing. From this view-point one did not deny that now and then the wording of a passage led to something unimportant, unedifying, or even unworthy of God the author ; but such could not possibly be the mind of the Spirit. Hence the wording was only somehow an index pointing to a deeper meaning in the back- ground. Moreover, it is plainly to be seen that by this method all the extra-scriptural doctrines and customs of the church could be easily imported into the Scripture, there- by securing divine authority for these later constituents of authority-religion. But if subsequent development could be thus biblicized, the Bible could also be so interpreted as to say nothing irrational in the opinion of those of other times and nations. The method, however, was not without its dangers to an authority-religion. Since the method is morally and scientifically groundless, it is also utterly law- less and subjective. In the course of history, diverse and even contradictory interpretations of Scripture were not only possible, but actual. One's own good pleasure in matters of faith could easily become the norm. Then one of the evils would return from which, by hypothesis, revelation was to rescue man, namely, trusting to his own understand- ing in spite of its folly and its sin. Hence the church must intervene. She must elaborate a criterion for interpretation. For the Romanist, the line of Scripture interpretation must be drawn according to the standard of Catholic faith and ecclesiastical tradition. The synod of the Council of Trent made it ecclesiastical law that no one was to trust his own sagacity in matters of faith and practice, but everyone must submit to ecclesiastical interpretation, since it belongs to the church alone to decide upon the true meaning.' The Bible, according to Bellarmin,^ must be interpreted by the same 1 Council of Trent, Sess. IV. 2 De verbo Dei, 3 : 3. The Foemation of Authority-Religion 73 spirit which indited it ; but where was that Spirit to be found save in the official representatives, the assembly of bishops in unity with Christ of the Catholic church?' The Reformers^ rejected allegorical interpretation, but the Protestant confessions returned to it, in a measure. Socinians and Arminians, consistent with their Pelagian proclivities, would acknowledge nothing anti-rational as result of inter- pretation. For example, if dogmas like the incarnation and substitutionary atonement seem to be in the Scriptures, it is better to treat the passages in which they are found as figures of speech, and so be able to give them a different interpreta- tion. But the Arminians asked: In cases where the meaning of Scripture is doubtful and opposite views are possible, how could one come to a decision except by preferring that mean- ing which contained no contradiction to sound reason ? This principle spread all the more as scientific culture and the so- called vulgar Aufkldrung increased. The principle, if not expressed, was implied and used by both supernaturalists and rationalists; for at this time the difference between the two was only one of degree; i. rinciple, completed; the essential thing was not the slow elaboration of its organization in detail. This church consciously founds itself upon the apostles and the apostolic, and it is a matter of entire indifference whether her claims are singly in accord with historical fact or not. The application of all this to the theme in hand, the origin of the New Testament, may be made without difficulty. The very instant one consciously points to a number of sacred writings as source of faith, along side of the writings of the Old Testament, one has a New Testament : prophets and apostles. To the consciousness of this church the apostles are no longer historical figures. Moreover, the con- sciousness was evanished that any of the apostolic writings owed their existence to accidental circumstances. The churches, e. g., could not let the Pauline letters go, for the reason that Marcion, among her opponents, had drawn pre- Dissolution of Authority-Religion 109 cisely on them as support for his teaching/ The church was in trouble, and such considerations, if they did not tip the scale, surely had great weight. At all events, matters developed more simply, more naturally, at this stage than many seem able or willing to suppose. If, now, it be correct that about the date above indicated the new collection of Scripture was in principle complete, it yet by no means follows that there was general agreement as to the scope of the New Testament, or that the boundary was already definitely drawn which separated this New Testament from other honored primitive Christian writings. At the year 150 we may not speak of a New Testament, although we may not be blind to the fact that there could have been sacred Christicm writings. But at our later date, even though we bear in mind that there was no sort of agreement as to the jiumber of writings which belong to these Sacred Scriptures, the evidence is indisputable that there were such writings. Concerning the scope of the New Testament the contro- versy waged long. Matters were not in such shape that an ecumenical council could be convened after the fashion of a later time, in which it could be decreed that from this day henceforth such and such writings belong to the New Testa- ment. Of course, some fixations as to valid documents must have been hit upon in single provinces, in Rome or Africa, Asia Minor or Egypt; and that critic was doubtless right who stated that, unless one is of the opinion that the canon — i. e., the New Testament — arose in the moon, one must assume such partial agreements. And the comparative harmony which prevailed very soon in single ecclesiastical regions speaks clearly for this. That our gospels, and only they, belonged in the New Testa- iWho knows whether this Catholic church, under different circumstances, would not have left Paul out, precisely Paul, the apostle of independence, with his epistles breathing religious freedom — the apostle who stood for the principle of personality over against the principle of authority I 110 The Finality of the Christian Keligion ment was common assumption. But this does not set aside the fact that in Syria, not our four gospels, but Tatian's Diatessaron, remained in use for centuries. Further, along with the Revelation of John, the apocryphal revelation of Peter bade for reception into the New Testament, e. g., in Egypt ; and, conversely, many people would have nothing to do with the Johannine Revelation, in the Orient and also in Spain, even in the fourth and fifth centuries. As to the so-called catholic epistles, there was agreement at first only as to First Peter and First John. That Second John and the epistle of Jude were to be accepted seems to have been the universal opinion, at least in the West. On the other hand, profound silence reigns concerning James and the second epistle of Peter — nor is mention made of Third John. While so many of our present New Testament writings were contested, the Epistle of Barnabas was read in many regions ; the two letters to Clement of Rome, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, the Shepherd of Hermas, were copied together with the New Testament, and were manifestly treated therefore as sacred writings. Thus it was only gradually that this canonical develop- ment came to an end. In the Oriental Greek church it is truer to say it was dormant rather than that it came to an end at all; while in the church of the West it was the all- prevailing influence of Augustine, who, about the year 400, in dependence on the church at Rome, was able to fix the present number according to which officially twenty-seven writings belong to the New Testament, as today. "Officially," since the written law was by no means able at a single stroke to abrogate the right of contrary custom. In Spanish synods, even about the year 600, opposition was maintained against the Revelation of John; and in the sub-Augustinian period the epistle to the Hebrews was left out of many a Bible, or was replaced by a supposed epistle of the apostles Dissolution of Authority-Keligion 111 to the Laodiceans, or the two figured side by side. And if Luther was of the opinion that the epistle of James was a "strawy" epistle, if he boldly said that his spirit could not make itself at home in the Revelation of John, he but uttered his forceful subjectivism in such judgments — -a subjectivism to which the apparent work-righteousness of James appeared inferior by the side of the faith-righteousness of the Great Apostle. With such judgments Luther religiously rather than critically protested against the dogma, and in con- sequence canon, of the New Testament. He protested against the idea that a thing was sacred, and inviolably valid, simply because it was expressed or taught in this or that book of the New Testament. He said sharply that he rejected the Revelation because he could not detect that it was produced by the Holy Spirit. He supplemented such autocratic utter- ances with the positive declaration that he intended to abide by the books which clearly and purely reflected Christ to him. To sum up: First, in the sub-apostolic period the Christian communities possessed only one class of canonical writings, the Old Testament — only these were regularly read in public worship. Secondly, as equal authority with the Old Testa- ment, the sayings of Jesus came to be honored. They, too, were read or recited at public worship. At the close of the sub-aj)ostolic age there were two sacred authorities: the prophets and the Lord. Thirdly, the letters and other didac- tic writings which the apostolic age originated were compara- tively little known, were no common ecclesiastical possession, but were the property of single churches to which they were addressed, or which had somehow come into possession of them. As yet they were not valid as sacred writings, perhaps were not regularly read in worship. Fourthly, how- ever, it was through the familiarity and endearment which apostolic writings later gained by being read at public wor- 112 The' Finality of the Christian Keligion ship that the process of sanctification went on, preliminary to their canonization. On the other hand, canonization marks the decay of immediacy in religion, the decay of the demonstration of the S^^irit and power, the passing away of that inner certitude due to the Spirit and power, and the replacement of productivity by reproductivity and sterility. Fifthly, comprehensively stated, the formation of the canon was necessitated by the warfare on the part of the Catholic church against heresy and Gnosticism, and the fixation of the canon was the work of later centuries. The conclusion which this reference to history yields, as affecting the subject under consideration, is inescapable. The canon of the New Testament is a work of the Catholic church. Appeal to the New Testament as eo ijiso an author- ity binding upon faith is a dogma of the Catholic church. The Catholics have ever reminded the Protestants that the Bible derived its canonical authority, and its delimitation over against the uncanonical, from that very church which Protestants have otherwise repudiated. And Protestantism is still debtor to Catholicism at this point. It is the Achilles' heel of Protestantism. In leaving this survey, it may be well to signalize the net results: (a) In authority-religion the Bible is an effect to be referred to miraculous divine causalities. The eighteenth- century criticism of deist, rationalist, and mystic, and the historico-critical movement of the nineteenth century, are decisive against this foundation of the value of the Bible. The Bible was not "automatically composed," is due rather to the "free caprice of the writers," and exhibits scientific and historic errors, expresses local and personal passions — in a word, has all the marks of a deliberate human composi- tion. (6) From a history of the origin and fixation of the canon, it is clear that the a priori declaration of the coin- cidence of canonicalness and immediate divineness has no Dissolution of Authority-Religion 113 historical support. From both points of view, the way the Bible came about, its constitution, origin, and history, wit- ness against its immediate miraculous derivation as set forth by authority-religion. Today we must get at the importance, meaning, and significance of the Bible in some other way. Its revelation-value must be based on its record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate. 3. The dissolution of the Protestant apologetic which appealed to prophecy defined as prediction, in order to prove the immediate supernatural derivation of the Bible, may be considered to be complete. In the early Christian centuries the orthodox church declared that the New Testament was an infallible inter- preter of Old Testament utterances. But from Justin's Dialogue with Trjjpho and Origen's Against Celsus it is evi- dent that proofs from prophecy so viewed were questioned, not only by heathen who may have lacked proper appercep- tion for understanding the Old Testament, but also by Jews who thought that the Christians gave an interpretation to prophecies that was contrary to their original meaning. The already often-mentioned allegorical method of interpretation, like a parallelogram of forces, served to resolve such in- equalities. But with the collapse of the method the solution was discredited. In early Protestantism a new method obtained, by which the New Testament interpretation of Old Testament pas- sages was harmonized with the local meaning of those pas- sages. The hypothesis that such passages had a double meaning — the one immediate, the other remote — was resort- ed to. It was assumed that the psychological basis of this hypothesis was a dual consciousness on the part of the Old Testament writers. But in opposition to this hypothesis it was pointed out, first, that certain New Testament quotations 114 The Finality of the Cheistian Religion expressly exclude the immediate meaning; and, secondly, that the so-called dual consciousness was psychologically improbable, that it were better for theologians to assume but one human consciousness and discard so vulnerable an hypoth- esis. Still the position was not immediately abandoned. It survived in the contention that the prophet had a glim- mer of the more remote higher meaning of the utterances along with the immediate sense and purpose. To this modi- fied assumption of the double meaning of prophecies, Socin- ians and Arminians added another rule, which had to do with the word "that it might be fulfilled" — holding that these words only indicate that there is a similarity in the passages, or that the Old Testament passage admits of application to the New Testament event, not exactly that it predicts that event. The German rationalists, with their usual vigor, urged that the Old Testament contained no prophecies, i. e., defi- nite predictions concerning Jesus Christ, no description of the life, vocation, sufferings, death, and resurrection of Jesus ; but that all the prophetic descriptions of the Messiah and messianic kingdom referred to the historical and human, to be explained without resort to miraculous prevision. It was not uniformly said — there were exceptions — that Jesus and the apostles erroneously interpreted the Old Testament prophecies contrary to their original meaning. Rather, it was said that they did not introduce these passages or prophecies, but applied them freely as we now apply passages of Scrip- ture to persons and events without thinking that the pas- sages had the reference which we give them; i. e., the Old Testament was used for purposes of edification. But the rationalists were forced by their opponents to face the question as to whether Jesus' own references to his death and resurrection were mere edificatory passages. It was said that only violent interpretation can ignore prediction here. Dissolution of Authoeity-Keligion 115 The rationalists made a twofold reply: first, the hypothesis that Jesus, as soon as he grew clear as to his duty and com- prehended the historical situation, foresaw the empirical inevitability of his death, and that thus no miraculous super- naturalism is required to explain his forebodings ; or, secondly, such narratives are a New Testament case of vaticinia post eventum. And it must be granted that either of these hypotheses is sufficient to cast a fatal doubt upon the argu- ment from predictive prophecy as employed in the religion of authority. The truth seems to be that, owing to the histori- cal necessity of vindicating the new religion by appeal to the traditional canonical authority, apologists had to find proof in the Old Testament that the life and works of Jesus were messianic, or else have no proof at all that would meet the case ; and so they culled from the Old Testament those passages that appeared to have messianic reference. To sum up: At first men thought that "prophecy" referred to the distant future and not at all to the present. Then they attributed a dual consciousness to the writer's mind. Afterward they made a typical interpretation of the prophecies. Lastly they reversed their first position and held that the prophecies referred to the present and not to the future. It was now incumbent upon them to give a psychological explanation of the New Testament usage of Old Testament passages. Briefly expressed, the develop- ment ran through the following stages: prophecy may have (a) literal reference to the future; (6) typical reference to the future; (c) dual reference to the present and the future; (d) no reference to the future. 4. The evidential value of miracles is the mainstay of authority-religion. Instead of being naturally or historically or psychologically mediated, miraculous events are due to immediate particular volitions of Deity' by virtue of which 1 The so-called "religious" miracle of the Eitschlians does not have any place in this historical discussion. 116 The Finality of the Cheistian Religion there are causes without their usual effects, or effects without their usual causes — metaphysical miracle. Hence the writ- ings, the rule of faith and practice, in which the miraculous narratives are imbedded, are likewise traceable to divine causality; but, if so, are infallible and divinely authori- tative. This doctrine of miracles as means of proof of the divinity of Christianity remained unshaken in the church down to modern times. Not that it enjoyed immimity from attack. The opponents of Jesus said that he did miracles by the help of demonic powers. In the early centuries, when this reproach was repeated, the church fathers met it by pointing to the moral character and teaching of Jesus, which were unthinkable were he in league with the devil. But, logically, there is something suspicious in this argument, inasmuch as it is said both that the miracles proved the teachings divine and that the teachings proved the miracles divine. This de- fect in the proof from miracles, however, was attributed to those miracles which were capable of producing only a fides humana, while the fides divina could be effectuated only by the inner witness of the Spirit. The lack of cogency of this proof from the inner witness has been set forth in a previous connection. But those who saw this put all the greater stress upon the proof from miracles, while restrict- ing the miraculous to the fewest possible cases. Indeed, there have ever been church teachers who have degraded biblical miracles, partly, to the great miracle of nature as a whole; partly, to the moral effects of Christianity. But whether Philo declared that the miracles of Moses were child's play as compared with the truly great miracle of creation ; or Augustine and Luther reproached the obtuseness of the multitude who wonder only at the miraculous; or Luther depreciated nature miracle in favor of Spirit miracle — in all these expressions neither the possibility, nor the Dissolution of Authokity-Religion 117 reality, nor the cogency of miracle as proof, was assailed. Even Calvin made much of the proof from miracles, though he harshly criticised the Lutherans for their doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ, saying that they did not feel sure of omnipotence unless they tore the whole fabric of nature into pieces by a self-made miracle.' It was Spinoza who first gave the concept of miracles a blow which resounded first in England among the deists, then in Germany, and which had great influence on all the sub- sequent development of theology. It may be said that there has been a strained relation ever since, as regards the miracu- lous, between philosophy and ecclesiastical Christianity. A reproduction of his argument follows. To begin with, the conception of God as Absolute does not comport with the idea of single acts which the Absolute was said to perform in the course of time.^ This consideration was urged against the thinkableness of miracles. For the rest, Spinoza's investigation concerning miracles fell into two parts, philo- sophical and exegetical. The former investigated the possi- bility and demonstrative power of the miraculous; the latter, the reality of miracles. As to the possibility of miracles, there were two questions: Is a miracle compatible with the nature of God in his relation to nature ? Can a miracle be known by man as miracle ? The former concerns the objective, the latter the subjective, possibility of miracles. The former, according to Spinoza, can be affirmed only by him who puts God and nature in juxtaposition as two sepa- rate substances, in such a way that the activity of the one Unst.,I\,ll,25. 2 Leibnitz thought that he found an essential alleviation of the conceivability of miracles by making higher beings, e. g., angels, instead of God, the authors of miracles in most cases. By virtue of their exaltation above nature, they could produce results in nature that could not be explained from nature's own forces. Moreover, being finite beings, their agency did not contradict the idea of the con- summation of single acts (Theodicee, III, 249) . Of course, this uncritically assumes the existence of angels. 118 The Finality of the Christian Religion excludes that of the other. If the laws of nature are some- thing in themselves, and the act of the Divine will is some- thing different therefrom, then, since one such act of will originally posited the laws of nature, another such act can wholly or partially suspend those laws. But, according to Spinoza, God and nature are not two, but one. "Deus sive substantia sive natura."' The laws of nature are the will of God in independent actualization. Therefore an occur- rence contravening the laws of nature contradicts the will of God. To affirm that God does something contrary to the laws of nature is tantamount to affirming that he does some- thing contrary to his own nature. The subterfuge of the distinction between the supernatural and the contra- or anti-natural falls away of itself from this point of view. For if nature, as the self-realization of the Divine Being, is homogeneous with the latter, then it is infi- nite, and, if infinite, there can be nothing apart from it nor above it. This consideration aside, if by hypothesis miracle occurs in nature, but not according to the laws of nature, then the otherwise universal validity and operation of those laws are interrupted in the case of miracle. But this inter- ruption of inviolable order is in contradiction of that order. Thus, since nothing occurs in nature save according to its laws, it follows that the term "miracle" is to be understood only relatively; i.