From the conception of a personal God-redeemer arose the possibility of sacrificing a man in God’s place, and of seeing the divine and ideal man, that is, the Idea of Man, in an actual man. From the growing Church’s desire for authority, from its opposition to Gnostic phantasy with its intellectual volatilising of the religious-moral kernel of the Pauline doctrine of redemption, and from the wish not to give up the historical connection with Judaism on opportunist grounds, arose the necessity of portraying the divine-human expiatory sacrifice as the sacrifice of an historical person who had arisen in Judaism. All these different reasons, which led to the formation of the belief in an “historical” Jesus, have no force with us, particularly after it has been shown that the personality of the principle of redemption, this fundamental presupposition of the evangelical “history,” is in the end to blame for all the contradictions and shortcomings of that religion. To lead back to its real essence the Christian doctrine of redemption can consequently mean nothing but placing the idea of the God-man, as it lies at the basis of that doctrine, in the central point of the religious view of the world, through the stripping off of the mythical personality of the Logos.
God must become man, so that Man can become God and be redeemed from the bounds of the finite. The idea of Man which is realised in the world must itself be a divine idea, an idea of the Deity, and so God must be the common root and essence of all individual men and things; only then may Man attain his existence in God and freedom from the world, through this consciousness of his supernatural divine essence. Man’s consciousness of himself and of his true essence must itself be a divine consciousness. Man, and indeed every man, must be a purely finite phenomenon, an individual limitation, the clothing of the Deity with a human form. In possibility he is a God-man, to be born again an actual God-man through his moral activity, and consequently to become really one with God. In this conception all the contradictions of Christian dogmatism are solved, and the kernel of its doctrine of redemption is preserved without being divested of its true significance by the introduction of mythical phantasy or of historical coincidences, as is the case in Christianity.
If we are still to use the language of the past, and to call the divine essence of mankind the immanent Godhead, “Christ,” then any advance of religion can only consist in the development and working out of this “inner Christ,” that is, of the spiritual-moral tendencies dwelling in mankind, in the carrying of it back to its absolute and divine basis, but not in the historical personification of this inner human nature. Any reality of the God-man consequently consists in “Christ’s” activity in Man, in the proving of his “true self,” of his personal, spiritual essence, in the raising of one’s self to personality on the ground of Man’s divine nature, but not in the magical efficacy of an external divine personality. This, indeed, is nothing but the religious ideal of mankind, which men have projected on to an historical figure, in order to assure themselves of the “reality” of the ideal. It is not true that it is “essential” to the religious consciousness to consider its ideal in human form, and that for this reason the historical Jesus is indispensable for the religious life. Were this true, religion would not be, in principle, in a position to raise itself above the mythical and primitive stage of God’s externality and appearance to the senses, and to conquer these Gods, working them more and more into the forms of an inner nature. This, however, is the essence of religious development. Religion would otherwise be confined to a lower province in the human life of the spirit; and it would be overthrown whenever the fiction of that projection and separation of God from one’s own self was seen through. It is only to orthodox Christianity that it is necessary to represent the God in Man as a God outside of Man, as the “unique” personality of a historical God-man; and that because it still remains with one foot in religious naturalism and mythology, and the historical circumstances of another age occasioned the choice of that representation and falsification of the idea of the God-man.
To think of the world’s activity as God’s activity; of mankind’s development, filled with struggles and sufferings, as the story of a divine struggle and Passion; of the world-process as the process of a God, who in each individual creature fights, suffers, conquers and dies, so that he may overcome the limitations of the finite in the religious consciousness of man and anticipate his future triumph over all the suffering of the world—that is the real Christian doctrine of redemption. To revive in this sense the fundamental conception from which Christianity sprang—and which is independent of any historical reference—is, indeed, to return to this religious starting-point. Protestantism, on the contrary, which repudiates Paul’s religion and sets up the Gospels as the foundation of its belief, nevertheless does not go behind Christianity’s development into the Church, back to the origin of Christianity, but remains always within this development, and deceives itself if it thinks that it can prevail over the Church from the point of view of the Gospel.[8]
In such an interpretation and development of the Christian conception of redemption “historical continuity” is preserved just as decidedly as it is in the one-sided making into history of that thought on the side of liberal Protestantism. What is in opposition to it is, on the one hand, completely unhistorical belief in an historical Jesus; on the other hand, the prejudice against the “immanent God,” or against Pantheism. But this prejudice is based entirely on that fiction of an historical “mediator” and the hypothesis contained therein of a dualistic separation of world and God. The representatives of the monistic conception—who began to organise themselves a short time ago—should be clearer as to the significance of that conception than they are for the most part even at the present day. They must perceive that the true doctrine of unity can only be the doctrine of the all in one. There must be an idealistic monism in opposition to the naturalistic monism of Haeckel, which is prevalent even to-day. This monism must not exclude but include God’s existence; and its present unfruitful negation of all religion must deepen into a positive and religiously valuable view of the world. Then, and not till then, will it be able to effect a genuine separation from the Church, and the monistic movement, still in its childhood, may lead to an inner improvement and renovation of our spiritual life in general. It requires much short-sightedness on the part of the exponents of a purely historical Christianity to suppose that the soulless and poor faith in the personal, or as it is considered better expressed to-day, in the “living” God, in freedom and immortality, supported by the authority of the “unique” personality of a man Jesus who died two thousand years ago, will be in a position permanently to satisfy religious needs, even when the metaphysic of redemption, still connected with it at all points, and the pious attitude based upon this are completely stripped off from it. The earlier the orthodox Christians, by giving up their superstition in an historical Jesus, and the Monists, by sacrificing their equally fatal superstition in the sole reality of matter and in the redeeming truths of physical science which alone can give happiness, come to a mutual reconciliation, the better it will be for both. The more surely we shall avoid the total obliteration of the religious consciousness; and the civilised nations of Europe will be saved from the loss of their spiritual ballast—towards which loss there seems at the present day to be a continuous movement on all sides. At present there are only two possibilities—either to look on quietly while the tidal wave of naturalism, getting ever more powerful from day to day, sweeps away the last vestige of religious thought, or to transfer the sinking fire of religion to the ground of Pantheism, in a religion independent of any ecclesiastical guardianship. The time of dualistic Theism has gone by. At present all the advancing spirits, in spheres most widely different, concur in striving towards Monism. This striving is so deeply grounded and so well warranted, that the Church will not be able to suppress it for ever.[9] The chief obstacle to a monistic religion and attitude is the belief, irreconcilable with reason or history, in the historical reality of a “unique,” ideal, and unsurpassable Redeemer.
[1] Cf. Arnold Meyer, “Was uns Jesus heute ist. Rel. Volksb.,” 1907—a very impressive presentation of the liberal Protestant point of view; also Weinel, “Jesus im 19ten Jahrhundert.” [↑]
[2] “Entstehung d. Chr.,” 98 sq. [↑]
[3] Weinel, indeed, resolutely denies that this is a real characteristic of liberal Protestantism, and asserts that he has looked for it in vain in any liberal theologian’s book. But he need only look in A. Meyer’s work, which is cited by me, to find my idea confirmed. There it is said of Jesus inter alia: “Not only should we move and live in his love, but we are as he was, of the faith that this love will overcome the world, that it is the meaning, end, and true content of the world; that the power which uniformly and omnipotently fills and guides the world, is nothing but the God in whom he believed [was Jesus then a Pantheist?], and whom he calls his heavenly father. As he believed, so let us also, that whoever trusts in this God and lives in his love has found the meaning of life and the power which preserves him in time and in eternity. Jesus was the founder of our religion, of our faith, and of our inner life” (31). According to Meyer, Jesus attracts us by his manner, his Being, his love and his faith, we feel ourselves bound to him, become kin with him and so live by his strength; he is called “the voice of God to us,” “our redeemer,” and so forth. Those are simply expressions which applied to God have at least a valid meaning, but applied to the historical man Jesus are nothing but phrases, and are to be explained purely psychologically from the fact that liberalism in honouring the “unique” man Jesus does nevertheless unwittingly allow the belief in his divinity to come into play. In this atmosphere, obscured with phrases, the so-called “theology” of liberal Protestantism moves. Moreover, Weinel himself quotes a sentence of Herrmann with approval, which also gives expression to the idea that Jesus is for Protestant liberalism a kind of “demonstration of God” (80), and he adds himself: “It may indeed be that our conception of the significance of Jesus has often been expressed unskilfully enough. It may be that in discourses, lectures, or other popular ways of speaking something is at times said which may be so clumsily put as to give occasion for such things to be said.” Indeed, he himself maintains regarding Jesus: “Whoever places the ideal of his life in him, he experiences God in him” (84). He also finds that the desire for God of the Jews, Greeks, Semites, and Germans “could be stilled in him.” Taking into account these expressions and the whole tone which it pleases Herr Weinel to adopt towards the opponents of his standpoint, it appears time to remind him once again of E. v. Hartmann’s “Die Selbstzersetzung des Christentums” (it is obvious he has only a third-hand acquaintance with the author whose point of view he calls Neo-Buddhism, counting him among the supporters of the morality of pity!) and especially of the chapter on “Die Irreligiosität des liberalen Protestantismus.” Here, in connection with the lack of metaphysics displayed by liberal Protestantism (and admitted even by Weinel) and the latter’s principle of love, he says: “If we transform the whole of religion into Ethics and soften down the whole of Ethics into love, we thereby renounce everything that is in religion besides love, and everything which makes love religious. We thereby confess that the impulse of love is raised into religion since religion properly so called has been lost. It is true religion is not a shark, as the inquisitors thought, but at the same time it is not a sea-nettle. A shark can at least be terrifying, a sea-nettle is always feeble.” Liberal Protestantism, as Hartmann sums it up, consists “of a shapeless, poor, shallow metaphysic, which is concealed as far as possible from critical eyes; of a worship successfully freed from all mystery, but one that has become thereby by no means incapable of being objected to; of an Ethics forcibly separated from Metaphysics and on that account irreligious. It rests upon a view of the world which by its worldliness and optimistic contentment with the world is by no means in a position to give birth to a religion, and which sooner or later will allow the remnants of religious feeling which it brought with it to be smothered in worldly ease.” [↑]