Eucken's teaching has been called a philosophical restatement of Christianity. He reiterates in philosophical language the theological doctrines of sin, of the new birth, of divine grace, and of the supremacy of Christian love. His argument for immortality is the religious argument: "The Infinite Power and Love that has grounded a new spontaneous nature in man, over against a dark and hostile world, will conserve such a new nature and its spiritual nucleus, and shelter it against all perils and assaults, so that life as the bearer of life eternal can never be wholly lost in the stream of time."[168]
3. From our exposition thus far it would seem unnecessary to ask the question, Can we still be Christians? and we are not surprised that Eucken's answer is, "We not only can but must be Christians."[169] A closer examination of his teaching shows that this question, and even the previous question, Can we still be theists? may naturally be raised. It is true that Eucken recoils from pantheism as lessening the energy of life,[170] and declares that the transcendence of the Divine must be asserted; but on the other hand we are warned that "the notion of the personal is here only a symbol for something transcending all conceptions and words."[171] It is too emotional and anthropomorphic. Eucken will not declare unqualified allegiance either to pantheism, to theism in its usual form or to agnosticism. In the Spiritual Life the opposition of monism and dualism, and apparently of the personal and the impersonal, are transcended. The overcoming of opposites in a way impossible for reason is precisely the office and prerogative of religion. It is to be noticed in his account of spiritual life that prayer, "the core of religion," is singularly absent; and in his exposition of Christianity he gives no prominence to the Fatherhood of God, central as that conception was in the teaching of Jesus.
With the doctrine of personality thus loosely held, it is no wonder that there are many elements in Christianity as usually understood which are uncongenial to Eucken's mode of thought. We cannot, he says, confine the union of God and man to one unique instance, and we must demand an immediate relationship between God and man throughout the whole breadth of the Spiritual Life; nor can we make the expression of divine love and grace dependent upon its one expression in Jesus Christ.[172] One time cannot set the standard for all time,[173] nor one historical person, absolutely, for all persons. The denial of sensible miracle, he allows, cuts deep into historical Christianity, but such a denial is necessary.[174] To affirm miracle is to make the spiritual too dependent on the sensible, and such a central miracle as the Resurrection "would mean an overthrow of the total order of nature, as this has been set forth through the work of modern investigation."[175]
However great the figure of Jesus may be, His greatness must be confined to the realm of humanity. "If Jesus, therefore, is not God, if Christ is not the second Person in the Trinity, then He is man; not a man like any average man among us, but still man. We can, then, revere Him as a leader, a hero, a martyr; but we cannot directly bind ourselves to Him or root ourselves in Him (bei ihm festlegen); we cannot submit to Him unconditionally. Still less can we make Him the object of a cult. To do so would be nothing less than an intolerable deification of a human being."[176]
What of those, we may ask, who in religious experience find themselves "rooted and grounded" in Christ? Eucken's readers cannot expect relief from this quarter, for religious experience, he holds, is too subjective and human to ground an inference to the nature of Spiritual Life.[177] It is evident that Eucken has cut deep into Christianity alike on its historical, its doctrinal and its experiential sides. He distinguishes between form and substance, but acknowledges that "religion has lost unspeakably much through the upheaval of the old form";[178] and that this must somehow be made good. We might, without violence in the comparison, imagine the case of a Mohammedan who, trained in modern modes of thought but clinging to old associations, asked himself the question, Can we still be Mohammedans? "Yes," he might reply, "but we must retain only the essence or soul of Mohammedanism—its monotheism. The historical body or existential form of Mohammedanism, namely, that Mohammed was the prophet of God and that the Koran is a revelation from heaven, must be given up. And even when we speak of the unity and personality of God, we must remember that we are employing symbol and metaphor."
Eucken presents the remarkable phenomenon of a man whose thought is saturated with Christian influence, who appreciates the moral power and splendour of Christianity and its regenerative effects in history, and yet is unable to reconcile its distinctive features with the fundamental concepts of his philosophy. He shows the close connection of the questions, What think ye of Christ? and, What think ye of God? and that assured belief in the personality of God and in His incarnation in a Person belong together. "No one cometh to the Father but by me." That a Christianity such as Eucken preaches, removed from supports in history, in authoritative doctrine, in religious experience, perhaps even in a rational theism, can retain its moral power and act as a spiritual lever for the elevation either of the masses or the classes, remains to be proved.
Our twentieth century philosophers are the prophets of a new age. Bergson's teaching opens before each individual and before humanity new possibilities of achievement, as, in obedience to the vital impulse, the army of humanity rushes on "in an overwhelming charge, able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."[179] Eucken, with the more serious burden of a moral message, has proclaimed with voice and pen the gospel of a new spiritual life and a new spiritual world. Do not these twentieth century prophets reëcho in a certain sense, each in his own language, the message which was heard among the Galilean hills in an age from which the centuries are measured, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand"?
III. Ward and the Realm of Ends
Our English speaking philosophers, in the more usual fashion, base their religious philosophy upon a theory of knowledge. It is noticeable, however, that both James Ward and Josiah Royce, while belonging to the idealistic tradition coming down from Kant and Hegel, show the influence of a revolt from that tradition. Ward begins with the many, with pluralism, while he ends with the one; and Royce declares himself an advocate of Absolute Pragmatism.