An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

by Edward Caldwell Moore

Herrmann is the one of the Ritschlians who has dealt with this matter not only with great clearness, but also with deep Christian feeling in his Verkehr des Christen mit Gott, 1886, and notably in his address, Der Begriff der Offenbarung, 1887. If the motive of religion were an intellectual curiosity, a verbal communication would suffice. As it is a practical necessity, this must be met by actual impulse in life. That passing out of the unhappiness of sin, into the peace and larger life which is salvation, does indeed imply the movement of God's spirit on our hearts, in conversion and thereafter. This is essentially mediated to us through the Scriptures, especially through those of the New Testament, because the New Testament contains the record of the personality of Jesus. In that our personality is filled with the spirit which breathes in him, our salvation is achieved. The image of Jesus which we receive acts upon us as something indubitably real. It vindicates itself as real, in that it takes hold upon our manhood. Of course, this assumes that the Church has been right in accepting the Gospels as historical. Herrmann candidly faces this question. Not every word or deed, he says, which is recorded concerning Jesus, belongs to this central and dynamic revelation of which we speak. We do not help men to see Jesus in a saving way if, on the strength of accounts in the New Testament, we insist concerning Jesus that he was born of a virgin, that he raised the dead, that he himself rose from the dead. We should not put these things before men with the declaration that they must assent to them. We must not try to persuade ourselves that that which acted upon the disciples as indubitably real must of necessity act similarly upon us. We are to allow ourselves to be seized and uplifted by that which, in our position, touches us as indubitably real. This is, in the first place, the moral character of Jesus. It is his inner life which, on the testimony of the disciples, meets us as something real and active in the world, as truly now as then. What are some facts of this inner life? The Jesus of the New Testament shows a firmness of religious conviction, a clearness of moral judgment, a purity and force of will, such as are not found united in any other figure in history. We have the image of a man who is conscious that he does not fall short of the ideal for which he offers himself. It is this consciousness which is yet united in him with the most perfect humility. He lives out his life and faces death in a confidence and independence which have never been approached. He has confidence that he can lift men to such a height that they also will partake with him in the highest good, through their full surrender to God and their life of love for their fellows.

It is clear that Herrmann aims to bring to the front only those elements in the life of Jesus which are likely to prove most effectual in meeting the need and winning the faith of the men of our age. He would cast into the background those elements which are likely to awaken doubt and to hinder the approach of men's souls to God. For Herrmann himself the virgin birth has the significance that the spiritual life of Jesus did not proceed from the sinful race. But Herrmann admits that a man could hold even that without needing to allege that the physical life of Jesus did not come into being in the ordinary way. The distinction between the inner and outward life of Jesus, and the declaration that belief in the former alone is necessary, has the result of thus ridding us of questions which can scarcely fail to be present to the mind of every modern man. Yet it would be unjust to imply that this is the purpose. Quite the contrary, the distinction is logical for this theology. Redemption is an affair of the inner life of a man. It is the force of the inner life of the Redeemer which avails for it. It is from the belief that such an inner and spiritual life was once realised here on earth, that our own faith gathers strength, and gets guidance in the conflict for the salvation of our souls. The belief in the historicity of such an inner life is necessary. So Harnack also declares in his Wesen des Christenthums, 1900. It is noteworthy that in this connexion neither of these writers advances to a form of speculation concerning the exalted Christ, which in recent years has had some currency. According to this doctrine, there is ascribed to the risen and ascended Jesus an existence with God which is thought of in terms different from those which we associate with the idea of immortality. In other words, this continued existence of Christ as God is a counterpart of that existence before the incarnation, which the doctrine of the pre-existence alleged. But surely this speculation can have no better standing than that of the pre-existence.

Sin in the language of religion is defection from the law of God. It is the transgression of the divine command. In what measure, therefore, the life of man can be thought of as sinful, depends upon his knowledge of the will of God. In Scripture, as in the legends of the early history of the race, this knowledge stands in intimate connexion with the witness to a primitive revelation. This thought has had a curious history. The ideas of mankind concerning God and his will have grown and changed as much as have any other ideas. The rudimentary idea of the good is probably of social origin. It first emerges in the conflict of men one with another. As the personalised ideal of conduct, the god then reacts upon conduct, as the conduct reacts upon the notion of the god. Only slowly has the ideal of the good been clarified. Only slowly have the gods been ethicised. 'An honest God is the noblest work of man.' The moralising and spiritualising of the idea of Jahve lies right upon the face of the Old Testament. The ascent of man on his ethical and spiritual side is as certain as is that on his physical side. Long struggle upward through ignorance, weakness, sin, gradual elevating of the standard of what ought to he, growingly successful effort to conform to that standard—this is what the history of the race has seen.

Athwart this lies the traditional dogma. The dogma took up into itself a legend of the childhood of the world. It elaborated that which in Genesis is vague and poetic into a vast scheme which has passed as a sacred philosophy of history. It postulated an original revelation. It affirmed the created state of man as one of holiness before a fall. To the framers of the dogma, if sin is the transgression of God's will, then it must be in light of a revelation of that will. In the Scriptures we have vague intimations concerning God's will, growingly clearer knowledge of that will, evolving through history to Jesus. In the dogma we have this grand assumption of a paradisaic state of perfectness in which the will of God was from the beginning perfectly known.

In the Platonic, as in the rabbinic, speculation the idea must precede the fact. Every step of progress is a defection from that idea. The dogma suffers from an insoluble contradiction within itself. It aims to give us the point of departure by which we are to recognise the nature of sin. At the same moment it would describe the perfection of man at which God has willed that by age-long struggle he should arrive. Now, if we place this perfection at the beginning of human history, before all human self-determination, we divest it of ethical quality. Whatever else it may be, it is not character. On the other hand, if we would make this perfection really that of moral character, then we cannot place it at the beginning of human history, but far down the course of the evolution of the higher human traits, of the consciousness of sin and of the struggle for redemption. It is not revelation from God, but naïve imagination, later giving place to adventurous speculation concerning the origin of the universe, which we have in the doctrine of the primeval perfection of man. We do not really make earnest with our Christian claim that in Jesus we have our paramount revelation, until we admit this. It is through Jesus, and not from Adam that we know sin.

So we might go on to say that the dogma of inherited guilt is a contradiction in terms. Disadvantage may be inherited, weakness, proclivity to sin, but not guilt, not sin in the sense of that which entails guilt. What entails guilt is action counter to the will of God which we know. That is always the act of the individual man myself. It cannot by any possibility be the act of another. It may be the consequence of the sins of my ancestors that I do moral evil without knowing it to be such. Even my fellows view this as a mitigation, if not as an exculpation. The very same act, however, which up to this point has been only an occasion for pity, becomes sin and entails guilt, when it passes through my own mind and will as a defection from a will of God in which I believe, and as a righteousness which I refuse. The confusion of guilt and sin in order to the inclusion of all under the need of salvation, as in the Augustinian scheme, ended in bewilderment and stultification of the moral sense. It caused men to despair of themselves and gravely to misrepresent God. It is no wonder if in the age of rationalism this dogma was largely done away with. The religious sense of sin was declared to be an hallucination. Nothing is more evident in the rationalist theology than its lack of the sense of sin. This alone is sufficient explanation of the impotency and inadequacy of that theology. Kant's doctrine of radical evil testifies to his deep sense that the rationalists were wrong. He could see also the impossibility of the ancient view. But he had no substitute. Hegel, much as he prided himself upon the restoration of dogma, viewed evil as only relative, good in the making. Schleiermacher made a beginning of construing the thought of sin from the point of view of the Christian consciousness. Ritschl was the first consistently to carry out Schleiermacher's idea, placing the Christian consciousness in the centre and claiming that the revelation of the righteousness of God and of the perfection of man is in Jesus. All men being sinners, there is a vast solidarity, which he describes as the Kingdom of Evil and sets over against the Kingdom of God, yet not so that the freedom or responsibility of man is impaired. God forgives all sin save that of wilful resistance to the spirit of the good. That is, Ritschl regards all sin, short of this last, as mainly ignorance and weakness. It is from Ritschl, and more particularly from Kaftan, that the phrases have been mainly taken which served as introduction to this paragraph.

For the work of God through Christ, in the salvation of men from the guilt and power of sin, various terms have been used. Different aspects of the work have been described by different names. Redemption, regeneration, justification, reconciliation and election or predestination—these are the familiar words. This is the order in which the conceptions stand, if we take them as they occur in consciousness. Election then means nothing more than the ultimate reference to God of the mystery of an experience in which the believer already rejoices. On the other hand, in the dogma the order is reversed. Election must come first, since it is the decree of God upon which all depends. Redemption and reconciliation have, in Christian doctrine, been traditionally regarded as completed transactions, waiting indeed to be applied to the individual or appropriated by him through faith, but of themselves without relation to faith. Reconciliation was long thought of as that of an angry God to man. Especially was this last the characteristic view of the West, where juristic notions prevailed. Origen talked of a right of the devil over the soul of man until bought off by the sacrifice of Christ. This is pure paganism, of course. The doctrine of Anselm marks a great advance. It runs somewhat thus: The divine honour is offended in the sin of man. Satisfaction corresponding to the greatness of the guilt must be rendered. Man is under obligation to render this satisfaction; yet he is unable so to do. A sin against God is an infinite offence. It demands an infinite satisfaction. Man can render no satisfaction which is not finite. The way out of this dilemma is the incarnation of the divine Logos. For the god-man, as man, is entitled to bring this satisfaction for men. On the other hand, as God he is able so to do. In his death this satisfaction is embodied. He gave his life freely. God having received satisfaction through him demands nothing more from us.

Abelard had, almost at the same time with Anselm, interpreted the death of Christ in far different fashion. It was a revelation of the love of God which wins men to love in turn. This notion of Abelard was far too subtle. The crass objective dogma of Anselm prevailed. The death of Christ was a sacrifice. The purpose was the propitiation of an angry God. The effect was that, on the side of God, a hindrance to man's salvation was removed. The doctrine accurately reflects the feudal ideas of the time which produced it. In Grotius was done away the notion of private right, which lies at the basis of the theory of Anselm. That of public duty took its place. A sovereign need not stand upon his offended honour, as in Anselm's thought. Still, he cannot, like a private citizen, freely forgive. He must maintain the dignity of his office, in order not to demoralise the world. The sufferings of Christ did not effect a necessary private satisfaction. They were an example which satisfied the moral order of the world. Apart from this change, the conception remains the same.

As Kaftan argues, we can escape the dreadful externality and artificiality of this scheme, only as redemption and regeneration are brought back to their primary place in consciousness. These are the initial experiences in which we become aware of God's work through Christ in us and for us. The reconciliation is of us. The redemption is from our sins. The regeneration is to a new moral life. Through the influence of Jesus, reconciled on our part to God and believing in His unchanging love to us, we are translated into God's kingdom and live for the eternal in our present existence. Redemption is indeed the work of God through Christ, but it has intelligible parallel in the awakening of the life of the mind, or again of the spirit of self-sacrifice, through the personal influence of the wise and good. Salvation begins in such an awakening through the personal influence of the wisest and best. It is transformation of our personality through the personality of Jesus, by the personal God of truth, of goodness and of love. All that which God through Jesus has done for us is futile, save as we make the actualisation of our deliverance from sin our continuous and unceasing task. When this connexion of thought is broken through, we transfer the whole matter of salvation from the inner to the outer world and make of it a transaction independent of the moral life of man.

Justification and reconciliation also are primarily acts and gifts of God. Justification is a forensic act. The sense is not that in justification we are made just. We are, so to say, temporarily thus regarded, not that leniency may become the occasion of a new offence, but that in grateful love we may make it the starting point of a new life. We must justify our justification. It is easy to see the objections to such a course on the part of a civil judge. He must consider the rights of others. It was this which brought Grotius and the rest, with the New England theologians down to Park, to feel that forgiveness could not be quite free. If we acknowledge that this symbolism of God as judge or sovereign is all symbolism, mere figure of speech, not fact at all, then that objection—and much else—falls away. If we assert that another figure of speech, that of God as Father, more perfectly suggests the relation of God and man, then forgiveness may be free. Then justification and forgiveness are only two words for one and the same idea. Then the nightmare of a God who would forgive and cannot, of a God who will forgive but may not justify until something further happens, is all done away. Then the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of our sins cannot be other than the relation of his life to that forgiveness. Both the one and the other are a revelation of the forgiving love of God. We may say that in his death the whole meaning of his life was gathered. We may say that his death was the consummation of his life, that without it his life would not have been what it is. This is, however, very far from being the ordinary statement of the relation of Jesus' death, either to his own life or to the forgiveness of our sins.