Part 26

§ 182.2. =The Older Rationalistic Theology.=--The older, so-called vulgar rationalism, was characterized by the self-sufficiency with which it rejected all advances from philosophy and theology, science and national literature. The new school of historico-critical rationalism availed itself of every aid in the direction of scientific investigation. The father of the vulgar rationalism of this age was =Röhr= of Weimar, who exercised his ingenuity in proving how one holding such views might still hold office in the church. To this school also belonged =Paulus= of Heidelberg, described by Marheineke as one who believes he thinks and thinks he believes but was incapable of either; =Wegscheider= of Halle, who in his “_Institutions theol. Christ. dogmaticæ_” repudiates miracles; =Bretschneider= of Gotha, who began as a supernaturalist and afterwards went over to extreme rationalism; and =Ammon= of Dresden, who afterwards passed over to rational supernaturalism.

§ 182.3. The founder of =Historico-critical Rationalism= was =De Wette=; a contemporary of Schleiermacher in Berlin University, but deprived of office in A.D. 1819 for sending a letter of condolence to the mother of Sands, which was regarded as an apology for his crime. From A.D. 1822 till his death in A.D. 1849 he continued to work unweariedly in Basel. His theological position had its starting point in the philosophy of his friend Fries, which he faithfully adhered to down to the end of his life. His friendship with Schleiermacher had also a powerful influence upon him. He too placed religion essentially in feeling, which, however, he associated much more closely with knowledge and will. In the church doctrines he recognised an important symbolical expression of religious truths, and so by the out and out rationalist he was all along sneered at as a mystic. But his chief strength lay in the sharp critical treatment which he gave to the biblical canon and the history of the O.T. and N.T. His commentaries on the whole of the N.T. are of permanent value, and contain his latest thoughts, when he had approached most nearly to positive Christianity. His literary career began in A.D. 1806 with a critical examination of the books of Chronicles. He also wrote on the Psalms, on Jewish history, on Jewish archæology, and made a new translation of the Bible. His Introductions to the O.T. and N.T. have been translated into English.--=Winer= of Leipzig is best known by his “Grammar of New Testament Greek,” first published in A.D. 1822, of which several English and American translations have appeared, the latest and best that of Dr. Moulton, made in A.D. 1870, from the sixth German edition. He also edited an admirable “_Bibl. Reallexicon_,” and wrote a work on symbolics which has been translated into English under the title “A Comparative View of the Doctrines and Confessions of the Various Communities of Christendom” (Edin., 1873).--=Gesenius= of Halle, who died A.D. 1842, has won a high reputation by his grammatical and lexicographical services and as author of a commentary on Isaiah--=Hupfeld= of Marburg and Halle, who died A.D. 1866, best known by his work in four vols. on the Psalms, in his critical attitude toward the O.T., belonged to the same party.--=Hitzig= of Zürich and Heidelberg, who died A.D. 1875, far outstripped all the rest in genius and subtlety of mind and critical acuteness. He wrote commentaries on most of the prophets and critical investigations into the O.T. history.--=Ewald= of Göttingen, A.D. 1803-1875, whose hand was against every man and every man’s hand against him, held the position of recognised dictator in the domain of Hebrew grammar, and uttered oracles as an infallible expounder of the biblical books. In his _Journal for Biblical Science_, he held an annual _auto da fe_ of all the biblico-theological literature of the preceding year; and, assuming a place alongside of Isaiah and Jeremiah, he pronounced in every preface a prophetic burden against the theological, ecclesiastical, or political ill doers of his time. His exegetical writings on the poetical and prophetical books of the O.T., his “History of Israel down to the Post-Apostolic Age,” and a condensed reproduction of his “Bible Doctrine of God,” under the title: “Revelation, its Nature and Record” and “Old and New Testament Theology,” have all appeared in English translations, and exhibit everywhere traces of brilliant genius and suggestive originality.[532]

§ 182.4. =Supernaturalism= of the older type (§ 171, 8) was now represented by Storr, Reinhard, Planck, Knapp, and Stäudlin. In Württemberg Storr’s school maintained its pre-eminence down to A.D. 1830. Neander, Tholuck, and Hengstenberg may be described as the founders and most powerful enunciators of the more recent =Pietistic Supernaturalism=. Powerfully influenced by Schleiermacher, his colleague in Berlin, =Neander=, A.D. 1789-1850, exercised an influence such as no other theological teacher had exerted since Luther and Melanchthon. Adopting Schleiermacher’s standpoint, he regarded religion as a matter of feeling: _Pectus est quod theologum facit_. By his subjective pectoral theology he became the father of modern scientific pietism, but it incapacitated him from understanding the longing of the age for the restoration of a firm objective basis for the faith. He was adverse to the Hegelian philosophy no less than to confessionalism. Neander was so completely a pectoralist, that even his criticism was dominated by feeling, as seen in his vacillations on questions of N.T. authenticity and historicity. His “Church History,” of which we have admirable English translations, was an epoch-making work, and his historical monographs were the result of careful original research.[533]--=Tholuck=, A.D. 1799-1877, from A.D. 1826 professor at Halle, at first devoted to oriental studies, roused to practical interests by Baron von Kottwitz of Berlin, gave himself with all his wide culture by preaching, lecturing and conversing to lead his students to Christ. His scientific theology was latitudinarian, but had the warmth and freshness of immediate contact with the living Saviour. His most important works are apologetical and exegetical. In his “Preludes to the History of Rationalism” he gives curious glimpses into the scandalous lives of students in the seventeenth century; and he afterwards confessed that these studies had helped to draw him into close sympathy with confessionalism. While always lax in his views of authenticity, he came to adopt a very decided position in regard to revelation and inspiration.--=Hengstenberg=, A.D. 1802-1869, from A.D. 1826 professor in Berlin, had quite another sort of development. Rendered determined by innumerable controversies, in none of which he abated a single hair’s breadth, he looked askance at science as a gift of the Danaides, and set forth in opposition to rationalism and naturalism a system of theology unmodified by all the theories of modern times. Born in the Reformed church and in his understanding of Scripture always more Calvinist than Lutheran, rationalising only upon miracles that seemed to detract from the dignity of God, and in his later years inclined to the Romish doctrine of justification, he may nevertheless claim to be classed among the confessionalists within the union. He deserves the credit of having given a great impulse to O.T. studies and a powerful defence of O.T. books, though often abandoning the position of an apologist for that of an advocate. His “Christology of the Old Testament,” in four vols., “Genuineness of the Pentateuch and Daniel,” three vols., “Egypt and the Books of Moses,” commentaries on Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel, the Gospel of John, Revelation, and his “History of the Kingdom of God in the Old Testament,” have all been translated into English.

§ 182.5. The so called =Rational Supernaturalism= admits the supernatural revelation in holy scripture, and puts reason alongside of it as an equally legitimate source of religious knowledge, and maintains the rationality of the contents of revelation. Its chief representative was =Baumgarten-Crusius= of Jena. Of a similar tendency, but more influenced by æsthetic culture and refined feeling, and latterly inclining more and more to the standpoint of “free Protestantism,” =Carl Hase=, after seven years’ work in Tübingen, opened his Jena career in A.D. 1830, which he closed by resigning his professorship in A.D. 1883, after sixty years’ labour in the theological chair. In his “Life of Jesus,” first published A.D. 1829, he represents Christ as the ideal man, sinless but not free from error, endowed with the fulness of love and the power of pure humanity, as having truly risen and become the author of a new life in the kingdom of God, of which the very essence is most purely and profoundly expressed in the gospel of the disciple who lay upon the Master’s heart. The latest revision of this work, issued in A.D. 1876 under the title “_Geschichte Jesu_,” treats the fourth gospel as non-Johnannine in authorship and mythical in its contents, and explains the resurrection by the theory of a swoon or a vision. In his “_Hutterus Redivivus_,” A.D. 1828, twelfth edition 1883, he seeks to set forth the Lutheran dogmatic as Hutter might have done had he lived in these days. This led to the publication of controversial pamphlets in A.D. 1834-1837, which dealt the deathblow to the _Rationalismus Vulgaris_. His “Church History,” distinguished by its admirable little sketches of leading personalities, was published in A.D. 1834, and the seventh edition of A.D. 1854 has been translated into English.

§ 182.6. =Speculative Theology.=--Its founder was =Daub=, professor at Heidelberg from A.D. 1794 till his death in A.D. 1836. Occupying and writing from the philosophical standpoints of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling successively, he published in A.D. 1816 “Judas Iscariot,” an elaborate discussion of the nature of evil, but passed over in A.D. 1833, with his treatise on dogmatics, to the Hegelian position. He exerted great influence as a professor, but his writings proved to most unintelligible.--=Marheineke= of Berlin in the first edition of his “Dogmatics” occupied the standpoint of Schelling, but in the second set forth Lutheran orthodoxy in accordance with the formulæ of the Hegelian system.--After Hegel’s death in A.D. 1831 his older pupils =Rosenkranz= and =Göschel= sought to enlist his philosophy in the service of orthodoxy. =Richter= was the first to give offence, by his “Doctrine of the Last Things,” in which he denounced the doctrine of immortality in the sense of personal existence after death. =Strauss=, A.D. 1808-1874, represented the “Life of Jesus,” in his work of A.D. 1835, as the product of unintentional romancing, and in his “_Glaubenslehre_” of A.D. 1840, sought to prove that all Christian doctrines are put an end to by modern science, and openly taught pantheism as the residuum of Christianity. =Bruno Bauer=, after passing from the right to the left Hegelian wing, described the gospels as the product of conscious fraud, and =Ludwig Feuerbach=, in his “Essence of Christianity,” A.D. 1841, set forth in all its nakedness the new gospel of self-adoration. The breach between the two parties in the school was now complete. Whatever Rosenkranz and Schaller from the centre, and Göschel and Gabler from the right, did to vindicate the honour of the system, they could not possibly restore the for ever shattered illusion that it was fundamentally Christian. Those of the right fell back into the camps of “the German theology” and the Lutheran confessionalism; while in the latest times the left has no prominent theological representative but Biedermann of Zürich.

§ 182.7. =The Tübingen School.=--Strauss was only the advanced skirmisher of a school which was proceeding under an able leader to subject the history of early Christianity to a searching examination. =Fred. Chr. Baur= of Tübingen, A.D. 1792-1860, almost unequalled among his contemporaries in acuteness, diligence, and learning, a pupil of Schleiermacher and Hegel, devoted himself mainly to historical research about the beginnings of Christianity. In this department he proceeded to reject almost everything that had previously been believed. He denied the genuineness of all the New Testament writings, with the exception of Revelation and the Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians; treating the rest as forgeries of the second century, resulting from a bitter struggle between the Petrine and Pauline parties. This scheme was set forth in a rudimentary form in the treatise on “The So-called Pastoral Epistles of the Apostle Paul,” A.D. 1835. His works, “Paul, the Apostle,” and the “History of the First Three Centuries,” have been translated into English. He had as collaborateurs in this work, Schwegler, Zeller, Hilgenfeld, Volkmar, etc. =Ritschl=, who was at first an adherent of the school, made important concessions to the right, and in the second edition of his great work, “_Die Entstehung d. alt-kath. Kirche_,” of A.D. 1857, announced himself as an opponent. =Hilgenfeld= of Jena, too, marked out new lines for himself in New Testament Introduction and in the estimate of early church doctrine, modifying in various ways the positions of Baur. The labours of this school and its opponents have done signal service in the cause of science.

§ 182.8. =Strauss=, who had meanwhile occupied himself with the studies of Von Hutten, Reimarus, and Lessing’s “Nathan,” feeling that the researches of the Tübingen school had antiquated his “Life of Jesus,” and stimulated by Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” written with French elegance and vivacity, in which he described Christ as an amiable hero of a Galilæan village story, undertook in 1864 a semi-jubilee reproduction of his work, addressed to “the German people.” This was followed by a severe controversial pamphlet, “The Half and the Whole,” in which he lashed the halting attempts of Schenkel as well as the uncompromising conservatism of Hengstenberg. He now pointed out cases of intentional romancing in the gospel narratives; the resurrection rests upon subjective visions of Christ’s disciples. His “Lectures on Voltaire” appeared in A.D. 1870, and in A.D. 1872 the most radical of all his books, “The Old and the New Faith,” which makes Christianity only a modified Judaism, the history of the resurrection mere “humbug,” and the whole gospel story the result of the “hallucinations” of the early Christians. The question whether “we” are still Christians he answers openly and honourably in the negative. He has also surmounted the standpoint of pantheism. The religion of the nineteenth century is _pancosmism_, its gospel the results of natural science with Darwin’s discoveries as its bible, its devotional works the national classics, its places of worship the concert rooms, theatres, museums, etc. The most violent attacks on this book came from the _Protestantenverein_. Strauss had said, “If the old faith is absurd, then the modernized edition of the ‘_Protestantenverein_’ and the school of Jena is doubly, trebly so. The old faith only contradicts reason, not itself; the new contradicts itself at every point, and how can it then be reconciled with reason?”[534]

§ 182.9. =The Mediating Theology.=--This tendency originated from the right wing of the school of Schleiermacher, still influenced more or less by the pectoralism of Neander. It adopted in dogmatics a more positive and in criticism a more conservative manner. It earnestly sought to promote the interests of the union not merely as a combination for church government, but as a communion under a confessional consensus. Its chief theological organs were the “_Studien und Kritiken_,” started in A.D. 1828, edited by Ullmann and Umbreit in Heidelberg, afterwards by Riehm and Köstlin in Halle, and the “_Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie_” of Dorner and Leibner, A.D. 1856-1878.--Although the mediating theology sought to sink all confessional differences, denominational descent was more or less traceable in most of its adherents. Its leading representatives from the =Reformed church= were: =Alexander Schweizer=, who most faithfully preserved the critical tendency of Schleiermacher, and, in a style far abler and subtler than any other modern theologian, expounded the Reformed system of doctrine in its rigid logical consistency. In his own system he gives a scientific exposition of the evangelical faith from the unionist standpoint, with many pious reflections on Scripture and the confession as well as results of Christian experience, based upon the threefold manifestation of God set forth without miracle in the physical order of the world, in the moral order of the world, and in the historical economy of the kingdom of God.--=Sack=, one of the oldest and most positive of Schleiermacher’s pupils, professor at Bonn, then superintendent at Magdeburg, wrote on apologetics and polemics. =Hagenbach= of Basel, A.D. 1801-1874, is well-known by his “Theological Encyclopædia and Methodology,” “History of the Reformation,” and “History of the Church in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” all of which are translated into English.--=John Peter Lange= of Bonn, A.D. 1802-1884, a man of genius, imaginative, poetic, and speculative, with strictly positive tendencies, widely known by his “Life of Christ” and the commentary on Old and New Testament, edited and contributed to by him.--=Dr. Philip Schaff= may also be named as the transplanter of German theology of the Neander-Tholuck type to the American soil. Born in Switzerland, he accepted a call as professor to the theological seminary of the German Reformed church at Mercersburg in 1843. He soon fell under suspicion of heresy, but was acquitted by the Synod of New York in 1845. In 1869 he accepted a call to a professorship in the richly endowed Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary of New York. Writing first in German and afterwards in English, his works treat of almost all the branches of theological science, especially in history and exegesis. He is also president of several societies engaged in active Christian work.

§ 182.10. Among those belonging originally to the =Lutheran church= were Schleiermacher’s successor in Berlin, =Twesten=, whose dogmatic treatise did not extend beyond the doctrine of God, a faithful adherent of Schleiermacher’s right wing on the Lutheran side; =Nitzsch=, professor in Bonn A.D. 1822-1847, and afterwards of Berlin till his death in A.D. 1868, best known by his “System of Christian Doctrine,” and his Protestant reply to Möhler’s “Symbolism,” a profound thinker with a noble Christian personality, and one of the most influential among the consensus theologians. =Julius Müller= of Halle, A.D. 1801-1878, if we except his theory of an ante-temporal fall, occupied the common doctrinal platform of the confessional unionists. His chief work, “The Christian Doctrine of Sin,” is a masterpiece of profound thinking and original research. =Ullmann=, A.D. 1796-1865, professor in Halle and Heidelberg, a noble and peace-loving character, distinguished himself in the domain of history by his monograph on “Gregory Nazianzen,” his “Reformers before the Reformation,” and most of all by his beautiful apologetical treatise on the “Sinlessness of Jesus.”--=Isaac Aug. Dorner=, A.D. 1809-1884, born and educated in Württemberg, latterly professor in Berlin, applied himself mainly to the elaborating of Christian doctrine, and gave to the world, in his “Doctrine of the Person of Christ,” in A.D. 1839, a work of careful historical research and theological speculation. The fundamental ideas of his Christology are the theory favoured by the “German” theology generally of the necessity of the incarnation even apart from sin (which Müller strongly opposed), and the notion of the archetypal Christ, the God-Man, as the collective sum of humanity, in whom “are gathered the patterns of all several individualities.” His “System of Christian Doctrine” formed the copestone of an almost fifty years’ academical career. Christ’s virgin birth is admitted as the condition of the essential union in Him of divinity and humanity; but the incarnation of the Logos extends through the whole earthly life of the Redeemer; it is first completed in his exaltation by means of his resurrection; it was therefore an operation of the Logos, as principle of all divine movement, _extra carnem_. His “System of Christian Ethics” was edited after his death by his son.[535]--=Richard Rothe=, A.D. 1799-1867, appointed in A.D. 1823 chaplain to the Prussian embassy at Rome, where he became intimately acquainted with Bunsen. In A.D. 1828 he was made ephorus at the preachers’ seminary of Wittenberg, and afterwards professor in Bonn and Heidelberg. Rothe was one of the most profound thinkers of the century, equalled by none of his contemporaries in the grasp, depth, and originality of his speculation. Though influenced by Schleiermacher, Neander, and Hegel, he for a long time withdrew like an anchoret from the strife of theologians and philosophers, and took up a position alongside of Oetinger in the chamber of the theosophists. His mental and spiritual constitution had indeed much in common with that great mystic. In his first important work, “_Die Anfänge der chr. Kirche_,” he gave expression to the idea that in its perfected form the church becomes merged into the state. The same thought is elaborated in his “Theological Ethics,” a work which in depth, originality, and conclusiveness of reasoning is almost unapproached, and is full of the most profound Christian views in spite of its many heterodoxies. In his later years he took part in the ecclesiastical conflicts in Baden (§ 196, 3) with the _Protestantenverein_ (§ 180, 1), and entered the arena of public ecclesiastical life.[536]--=Beyschlag= of Halle, in his “_Christologie d. N. T._,” A.D. 1866, carried out Schleiermacher’s idea of Christ as only man, not God and man but the ideal of man, not of two natures but only one, the archetypal human, which, however, as such is divine, because the complete representation of the divine nature in the human. From this standpoint, too, he vindicates the authenticity of John’s Gospel, and from Romans ix.-xi. works out a “Pauline Theodicy.”--=Hans Lassen Martensen=, A.D. 1808-1884, professor at Copenhagen, Bishop of Zealand and primate of Denmark, with high speculative endowments and a considerable tincture of theosophical mysticism, has become through his “Christian Dogmatics,” “Christian Ethics,” in three vols., etc., of a thoroughly Lutheran type, one of the best known theologians of the century.