An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

by Edward Caldwell Moore

Our most profitable mode of procedure would seem to be this. We shall seek to follow, as we may, those few main movements of thought marking the nineteenth century which have immediate bearing upon our theme. We shall try to register the effect which these movements have had upon religious conceptions. It will not be possible at any point to do more than to select typical examples. Perhaps the true method is that we should go back to the beginnings of each one of these movements. We should mark the emergence of a few great ideas. It is the emergence of an idea which is dramatically interesting. It is the moment of emergence in which that which is characteristic appears. Our subject is far too complicated to permit that the ramifications of these influences should be followed in detail. Modifications, subtractions, additions, the reader must make for himself.

These main movements of thought are, as has been said, three in number. We shall take them in their chronological order. There is first the philosophical revolution which is commonly associated with the name of Kant. If we were to seek with arbitrary exactitude to fix a date for the beginning of this movement, this might be the year of the publication of his first great work, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in 1781.[¹] Kant was indeed himself, both intellectually and spiritually, the product of tendencies which had long been gathering strength. He was the exponent of ideas which in fragmentary way had been expressed by others, but he gathered into himself in amazing fashion the impulses of his age. Out from some portion of his works lead almost all the paths which philosophical thinkers since his time have trod. One cannot say even of his work, Der Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793, that it is the sole source, or even the greatest source, of his influence upon religious thinking. But from the body of his work as a whole, there came a new theory of knowledge which has changed completely the notion of revelation. There came also a view of the universe as an ideal unity which, especially as elaborated by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, has radically altered the traditional ideas of God, of man, of nature and of their relations, the one to the other.

Footnote 1:[(return)]

In the text the titles of books which are discussed are given for the first time in the language in which they are written. Books which are merely alluded to are mentioned in English.

We shall have then, secondly, to note the historical and critical movement. It is the effort to apply consistently and without fear the maxims of historical and literary criticism to the documents of the Old and New Testaments. With still greater arbitrariness, and yet with appreciation of the significance of Strauss' endeavour, we might set as the date of the full impact of this movement upon cherished religious convictions, that of the publication of his Leben Jesu, 1835. This movement has supported with abundant evidence the insight of the philosophers as to the nature of revelation. It has shown that that which we actually have in the Scriptures is just that which Kant, with his reverence for the freedom of the human mind, had indicated that we must have, if revelation is to be believed in at all. With this changed view has come an altered attitude toward many statements which devout men had held that they must accept as true, because these were found in Scripture. With this changed view the whole history, whether of the Jewish people or of Jesus and the origins of the Christian Church, has been set in a new light.

In the third place, we shall have to deal with the influence of the sciences of nature and of society, as these have been developed throughout the whole course of the nineteenth century. If one must have a date for an outstanding event in this portion of the history, perhaps that of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, 1859, would serve as well as any other. The principles of these sciences have come to underlie in a great measure all the reflection of cultivated men in our time. In amazing degree they have percolated, through elementary instruction, through popular literature, and through the newspapers, to the masses of mankind. They are recognised as the basis of a triumphant material civilisation, which has made everything pertaining to the inner and spiritual life seem remote. Through the social sciences there has come an impulse to the transfer of emphasis from the individual to society, the disposition to see everything in its social bearing, to do everything in the light of its social antecedents and of its social consequences. Here again we have to note the profoundest influence upon religious conceptions. The very notion connected with the words redemption and salvation appears to have been changed.

In the case of each of these particular movements the church, as the organ of Christianity, has passed through a period of antagonism to these influences, of fear of their consequences, of resistance to their progress. In large portions of the church at the present moment the protest is renewed. The substance of these modern teachings, which yet seem to be the very warp and woof of the intellectual life of the modern man, is repudiated and denounced. It is held to imperil the salvation of the soul. It is pronounced impossible of combination with belief in a divinely revealed truth concerning the universe and a saving faith for men. In other churches, outside the churches, the forms in which men hold their Christianity have been in large measure adjusted to the results of these great movements of thought. They have, as these men themselves believe, been immensely strengthened and made sure by those very influences which were once considered dangerous.

In connection with this indication of the nature of our materials, we have sought to say something of the time of emergence of the salient elements. It may be in point also to give some intimation of the place of their origins, that is to say, of the participation of the various nationalities in this common task of the modern Christian world. That international quality of scholarship which seems to us natural, is a thing of very recent date. That a discovery should within a reasonable interval become the property of all educated men, that scholars of one nation should profit by that which the learned of another land have done, appears to us a thing to be assumed. It has not always been so, especially not in matters of religious faith. The Roman Church and the Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain international character. Again the Renaissance and Reformation had a certain world wide quality. The relations of the English Church in the reigns of the last Tudors to Germany, Switzerland, and France are not to be forgotten. But the life of the Protestant national churches in the eighteenth century shows little of this trait. The barriers of language counted for something. The provincialism of national churches and denominational predilections counted for more.

In the philosophical movement we must begin with the Germans. The movement of English thought known as deism was a distinct forerunner of the rationalist movement, within the particular area of the discussion of religion. However, it ran into the sand. The rationalist movement, considered in its other aspects, never attained in England in the eighteenth century the proportions which it assumed in France and Germany. In France that movement ran its full course, both among the learned and, equally, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for years cried, 'Écrasez l'infâme,' and Rousseau preached that the youth would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism. Quite logically, therefore, after the downfall of the Republic and of the Empire there set in a great reaction. Still it was simply a reversion to the absolute religion of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth by the Jesuit party. There was no real transcending of the rationalist movement in France in the interest of religion. There has been no great constructive movement in religious thought in France in the nineteenth century. There is relatively little literature of our subject in the French language until recent years.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rationalist movement had always had over against it the great foil and counterpoise of the pietist movement. Rationalism ran a much soberer course than in France. It was never a revolutionary and destructive movement as in France. It was not a dilettante and aristocratic movement as deism had been in England. It was far more creative and constructive than elsewhere. Here also before the end of the century it had run its course. Yet here the men who transcended the rationalist movement and shaped the spiritual revival in the beginning of the nineteenth century were men who had themselves been trained in the bosom of the rationalist movement. They had appropriated the benefits of it. They did not represent a violent reaction against it, but a natural and inevitable progress within and beyond it. This it was which gave to the Germans their leadership at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the sphere of the intellectual life. It is worthy of note that the great heroes of the intellectual life in Germany, in the period of which we speak, were most of them deeply interested in the problem of religion. The first man to bring to England the leaven of this new spirit, and therewith to transcend the old philosophical standpoint of Locke and Hume, was Coleridge with his Aids to Reflection, published in 1825. But even after this impulse of Coleridge the movement remained in England a sporadic and uncertain one. It had nothing of the volume and conservativeness which belonged to it in Germany.