The Freedom of Science

by Josef Donat

In the first place, there has been dropped the fundamental thesis of the divinity of Christ, whereupon rests the entire structure of Christianity. Man's modern emancipation from everything supernatural has been accomplished also with respect to the person of Christ: the man Christ is divested of His divinity and of everything miraculous; His birth by the virgin, His miracles and prophecies, His resurrection and ascension, once the subjects of exalting feasts, have fallen a victim to unbelieving science. It is true, they exert themselves to keep His person in view, they want the purely human Jesus to hold His old position of God and man in the believing consciousness, to conceal the mental pauperization. But this trick is failing more and more. The Son of God sees Himself gradually placed among the great men of history; we are becoming accustomed to find in the “Biographies of Celebrated Men,” among “Religious Educators,” side by side with Confucius, Buddha, Augustine, Mohammed, Luther, Kant, and Goethe, also the name of Jesus. The lustre of the past belief in His divinity is paling. In the eyes of unbelieving science He has ceased to be the infallible, all-surpassing Authority, and the basis of the faith. The teaching of Jesus has become the subject of an analyzing and eliminating criticism, and whenever deemed advisable His authority is simply ignored; He was human, affected by the views and errors of His age.

Thus they know, as does H. Gunkel, that “Jesus and the Apostles evidently have taken those narratives (the miracles of Genesis) to be reality and not poetry”; “the men of the New Testament on such questions take no particular attitude but share the (erroneous) opinions of their times.” They also know “that in regard to persons possessed with demons Jesus shared the erroneous notions of his time” (Braun), and Fr. Delitzsch informs us that it was “particularly a Babylonian superstition,” in consequence of which “the belief in demons and devils assumed such importance in the imagination of Jesus of Nazareth and of his Galilean disciples.” Thus the word is fulfilled literally: “He is a sign which will be contradicted.”

No one knows really who Jesus was. His person is the football of opinions. “If any one desiring reliable information, as to who Jesus Christ was, and what message He brought, should consult the literature of the day, he would find buzzing round [pg 282] him contradictory voices.... Taken all in all, the impression made by these contradicting opinions is depressing: the confusion seems past hope,” admits Prof. Harnack.

Also E. V. Hartmann remarks: “Thus, according to some, Jesus was a poet, to others a mystic visionary, a third sees in him the militant hero for freedom and human dignity, to a fourth he was the organizer of a new Church and of an ecclesiastical system of ethics, to a fifth the rationalistic reformer ... to the eleventh a naturalistic pantheist like Giordano Bruno, to the twelfth a superman on the order of Nietzsche's Zarathustra....” A chaos of opinions agreeing only in the one aim of rejecting His divinity. A. Schweitzer, himself a representative of liberal Protestant research, says, “Nothing is more negative than the result of the research concerning the life of Jesus.” And knowing Jesus's person no longer, they no longer know anything certain about His teaching, as is clear from the above. According to I. Wellhausen, from the “unsufficient fragments at hand we can get but a scanty conception of the doctrine of Jesus.”—The fathers were rich, the children have grown poor. Dissipaverunt substantiam suam!

To many even the existence of Jesus has become doubtful; and this not only to men of an irreligious propaganda, like Prof. A. Drews, who, carried away by the corroding tendency of a radical age, journeyed from town to town in order to proclaim, in the twentieth century of Christian reckoning, the scientific discovery of the “Myth of Christ”; but even to others the existence of Jesus has become doubtful or at least valueless. The task now is to do away entirely with the person of Jesus, and to solve the problem of preserving a Christian faith without a Christ. In this sense Prof. M. Rade writes: “Serious and gifted men having asserted that Jesus never existed (or, what amounts to the same, that, if He ever lived, nothing is known of Him; hence, His existence is of no historical importance), we dogmatists almost have to be grateful to them for having helped us to put a very concrete question no longer in general terms: how does religious certainty face historical criticism? but quite specifically: how does religious certainty (of the Christian) regard the historic-scientific possibility of the non-existence of the historical Jesus?” They frankly assert that they could entirely forego the person of Christ. Thus Prof. P. W. Schmiedeldeclares: “My innermost religious conviction would not suffer injury were I to be convinced to-day that Jesus never lived.... I would know that I could not lose the measure of piety that has become my property long since, even if I cannot derive it any longer from Jesus.” “Neither does my piety require me to see in Jesus an absolutely perfect type, nor would it disturb me were I to find someone else actually surpassing Him, which undoubtedly is the case in some respects.”For him to whom Christ is no longer God but a man and capable of error, His person and existence have necessarily lost their value.

Thus we have arrived at a Christianity without a Christ. As yet the person of the Lord is usually surrounded by a halo: [pg 283] it is the after-effect of a faithful past, the last rays of a setting sun. That this last glimmer, too, will pale and give way to darkness is but a question of time, when with more honesty expression will be given to the conclusion necessarily arrived at. If Christ is not what He claimed to be, God and Messiah, then the belief in His being the Son of God and the Messiah, in His right to abrogate the religion of the Old Testament and to found a new religion, commanding its acceptance under penalty of damnation—all this can be nothing but the result of religious fanaticism and mental derangement. And science is, in all seriousness, preparing to turn into this direction.

It is true, many are hesitating to draw these fearful conclusions and to utter them; arriving at this point, they cautiously stop: so Harnack. “How Jesus could arrive at the consciousness of His unique relation to God as His Son, how He became conscious of His power as well as of the obligation and task involved in this power, that is His secret, and no psychology will ever disclose it.... Here, all research must halt.” It is the silence of embarrassment, but equally of unscientific method. Having arrived at untenable conclusions, when question upon question is impetuously suggested, they stop suddenly and have nothing to say but a vague word about inscrutableness.

But there are those who actually speak the word so horrible to a Christian heart: Jesus was demented, a subject for pathology. Straussindicated this cautiously: “One who expects to return after his death in a manner in which no human being had ever returned, he is to us ... not exactly a lunatic, but a great visionary.” Others speak more plainly. Holtzmann's answer to the question: Was Jesus an Ecstatic, is an emphatic: “Yes, He was.” De Loosten considers him insane. E. Rasmussen thinks Him an epileptic, but grants to physicians the right to reckon him among paranoiacs or lunatics. To A. JülicherJesus is a visionary, “a mystic, not satisfied to dream of his ideals, but who lived with them, worked with them, even saw them tangibly before his eyes, deceiving himself and others.” Thus the supernatural has become madness; Jesus Christ, for whose divinity the martyrs went to their death, wears now, before the forum of a false science, Herod's cloak of foolishness.

With the fall of this fundamental dogma there must necessarily fall all other specific truths of Christianity, and they have fallen. The Holy Writ, once the work of the Holy Ghost, has now become a book like the Indian Vedda, to some perhaps even more unreliable; original sin, Redemption and grace, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments, have been dropped or [pg 284] changed into symbols, of which every one may think what he pleases. They have tried to make Christianity “acceptable to our times,” to “bring it nearer to the modern idea.” There is really nothing left to offend modern man, nothing that could get in conflict with any idea. The essence of Christianity is depreciated and emptied until it has become only a vague sentiment, without thought; a few names, without ideas. “Christianity as a Gospel,” so teaches Harnack, “has but one aim: to find the living God, that every individual may find Him as his God, gaining strength and joy and peace. How it attains this aim through the centuries, whether with the Coefficient of the Jewish or the Greek, of flight from the world or of civilization, of Gnosticism or Agnosticism—this all is of secondary consideration.” Of secondary consideration it is, then, whether one is convinced of the existence of God or whether he doubts with the agnostics, whether he believes in a personal God or not. To-day even the pantheist who does not acknowledge a Creator of Heaven and Earth may be a Christian; and so can he who no longer believes in personal immortality and in a hereafter; for, we are informed, “this religion is above the contrasts of here and the beyond, of life and death, of Reason and Ecstatics, of Judaism and Hellenism” (Harnack). Thus there is no thought which could not be made to agree with this despoiled Christianity. For, we are told further, “much less does the Gospel presuppose, or is joined to, a fixed theory of nature—not even in a negative sense could this be asserted” (Harnack). Materialism and Spiritualism, Theism and Pantheism, Belief or Negation of Creation, everything will harmonize with a Christianity thus degraded to a thing without character or principle.[15]

All that is left is a word of love, of a kind Father, of filiation to God, and union with God: words robbed of their true meaning; a shell without a kernel, ruins with the name “Christianity” still inscribed thereon, telling of a house that once [pg 285] stood here, wherein the fathers dwelt, but long since vacated by their children. Dissipaverunt substantiam suam!