Nay more, we are justified in not paring down the most developed forms of the Pauline system, but preserving them in theological usage, for they serve to express most sharply the opposition between Christianity and Judaism. What urges us to this is not solely the predominant custom of the Western Church and the Reformed tradition, but the fact that by means of the Pauline formulas the uniqueness of Christianity is marked off from the Pharisaic falsification of the religion of the Old Testament, and thereby the Christian Church most securely protected against a recrudescence of the latter error.

The precondition, thus indicated as essential for the understanding of forgiveness, justification, and reconciliation, which are assured through Christ, holds good for every part of the Christian circle of thought. We are able to know and understand God, sin, conversion, eternal life, in the Christian sense, only so far as we consciously and intentionally reckon ourselves members of the community which Christ has founded. Theology is bound to take up this point of view, and only so is there any hope of constructing a theological system which deserves the name. For in order to comprehend the content of Christianity, as a totality composed of rightly ordered particular data, we must occupy one and the same standpoint throughout. The form in which theology has hitherto been elaborated—after the model of Melanchthon’s Loci—disobeys this principle. It takes up its standpoint, first of all, in the far-off domain of man’s original perfection, which it makes correlative to a certain rational conception of God, correlative that is to the necessary twofold recompense which God awards to men, bound as they are to conform to His law. The formula of the foedus operum, which Cocceius invented for this combination of ideas, is thoroughly well suited to the exposition of this doctrine given earlier and later by Lutheran and Reformed theology. The traditional doctrine of man’s original state, consequently, implies that theology takes up its standpoint within either a natural or a universally rational knowledge of God which has nothing to do with the Christian knowledge of Him, and is consequently indifferent to the question whether the expositor who expounds the doctrine belongs to the Christian community or not. The nature and the extent of sin, accepted as a fact, is thereafter determined by the standard of the first man’s original perfection. Passages of Scripture may be used as well, but that makes no difference, for they are not read in the light of the fact that the Apostle Paul’s view of the effect on the human race of the first transgression is determined by its contrast to the effect of Christ upon His community. Traditional theology, in using the passage Rom. v. 12, rather keeps to the lines of Augustine, who, on thoroughly rational grounds, deduced original sin from the sin of the first human pair. Next, theology takes up its standpoint on the fact of the universally inherited sin of the human race, and undertakes to deduce from this the necessity of a redemption, the method of which is brought out by comparing sin with the Divine attribute of retributory righteousness in the purely rational style which Anselm has applied to this topic. Then follows, at the third stage of the traditional theological system, the knowledge of Christ’s Person and work, and its application to the individual and the fellowship of believers. Not until it has to deal with this topic does theology take up the standpoint of the community of believers, but it does so in such a way that the above-mentioned rational conception of redemption is held to throughout the exposition of its actual course. No system can result from a method which thus traverses three separate points of view in accomplishing the different parts of its task. A method which is so predominantly inspired by purely rational ideas of God and sin and redemption is not the positive theology which we need, and which can be defended against the objections of general rationalism.

Advocates of this method, who are unaware of its defects and feel no need to get rid of them, are therefore likewise incapable of understanding an exposition of Christian doctrine which views and judges every part of the system from the standpoint of the redeemed community of Christ. When they confront a rounded exposition of theology, represented on a single surface, with their many-angled mirror, of course they get nothing but a broken reflection. But the blame falls not on one who has ventured to employ the systematic method in theology, but upon the critics who cherish the belief that their own fragmentary knowledge, which loses itself in a variety of tentative efforts, complies with the conditions of systematic thought.¹ But system proper must all the more certainly be conditioned by the fact that every part of theological knowledge is construed from the standpoint of the Christian community, since only so can the worth of Christ as Revealer be employed throughout as the basis of knowledge in solving all the problems of theology. This constituted the new principle which Luther set forth in various passages, collected in Schultz’s treatise (cited vol. i. p. 219). Reference is made there to the fact that Luther admits no “disinterested” knowledge of God, but recognises as a religious datum only such knowledge of Him as takes the form of unconditional trust. This knowledge, however, is so exclusively bound up with Christ, that whatever knowledge of God exists alongside of it does not, as the Scholastics suppose, arrive at a neutral idea of God, but issues solely in contempt or hatred of Him. This line of thought is to be found not only in Luther’s Larger Catechism,² but also in the Augsburg Confession, xx. 24.³ In 1543 Melanchthon merely echoes in a feeble way the principle that God is knowable only through the mediation of Christ, a principle which in the Loci of 1535 he had recognised with a certain emphasis.⁴ The while, he builds Christian doctrine on a foundation of natural theology, after the model of the Scholastics. All this is a result of his return of Aristotle. Not only does the close affinity between Humanism and Scholasticism betray itself here, but Melanchthon abandons the task of constructing theology according to Luther’s principle. That task I essay in the full consciousness that my action is justified and rendered imperative by the standard writings of the Reformation. But if we can rightly know God only if we know Him through Christ, then we can know Him only if we belong to the community of believers. Not only, however, are God and all the operations of His grace to be construed through the revelation in Christ, but even sin can be appreciated only in virtue of the forgiveness of sins which is Christ’s special gift: for, as the Apology puts it, ii. 62: Evangelium arguit omnes, quod sint sub peccato. V. 29: Haec est summa praedictionis evangelii, arguere peccata et offerre remissionem peccatorum.⁵

This theological method, too, is the legitimate solution of the dilemma in which Spener places us between theologia regenitorum aut irregenitorum.⁶ That theology no less than the Christian faith should possess the marks of the regenerate life, is obvious; as it is also intelligible that Spener should find those marks awanting in the pedantic theology cultivated in his day. But if the point was to prove that those supernatural characteristics were present, that was impossible so long as theology retained its traditional arrangement and form. For opponents might rejoin that, provided their system were materially correct, it came to them from the Holy Spirit. And Spener’s principle that theology is to be learned through prayer and moral discipline either ends in fanaticism, or is susceptible of a practicable meaning only when it is taken as a suggestion for making a fruitful application of theology in the pulpit and pastoral work. Spener,⁷ however, claimed for theology a yet wider point of view—it is to make good its derivation from the Holy Spirit in virtue of the truth that “whoever willeth to do the will of God will know the truth of Christ’s doctrine” (John vii. 17). This implies a complete revision of the matter of theology; for the traditional system was and is not adapted to this ethical proof of the truth of Christianity. What Spener’s principles indicate, however, is the way to such a conception of the Christian view of the world and of life as can hope for success only when it is attempted from the standpoint of the community of believers. This standpoint, however, conforms likewise to the maxim that theology must emanate from the Holy Spirit. But if anyone builds Christian theology on a substructure of pretended Natural Theology, the rationalistic arguments of Augustine about original sin, and those of Anselm about the nature of redemption, he thereby takes his stand outside the sphere of regeneration, which is coterminous with the community of believers.

§ 2. The form of systematic theology is bound up, first of all, with the correct and complete idea of the Christian Religion. The latter is reached by an orderly reproduction of the thought of Christ and the apostles; it is confirmed by being compared with other species and stages of religion. The specifically peculiar nature of Christianity, which at every turn of theology must be kept intact, can be ascertained only by calling the general history of religion to our aid. Schleiermacher was the first to adopt this method (vol. i. p. 440 ff.). It is this that makes his definition of religion so important, even though when more closely examined it by no means justifies its claims. “The Christian religion is that monotheistic form of faith within the teleological (moral) class, in which everything is referred to the redemption wrought by Jesus.” The relation between this special characteristic and the generic qualities of Christianity is not stated with the clearness we desire. For if the Divine final end is embodied in the Kingdom of God,⁸ it is to be expected that the redemption which has come through Jesus should also be related, as a means, to this final end. But as this relation is not expressed, the result is that Schleiermacher construes the whole Christian consciousness of God by reference now to redemption through Jesus, now to the idea of the Kingdom of God, without coming to any decision regarding the mutual relations of this final end and the function of the Mediator. The natural consequence of this want of lucidity is that no topic receives less justice in the general argument of his Glaubenslehre than what he admits to be the teleological character of Christianity. The latter is constantly crossed by the neutral idea of religion by which he is guided, by the abstract Monotheism which he follows, and finally by everything being referred solely to redemption through Jesus. His obscure definition betrays the fact, at the very outset, that Schleiermacher had not taken his final bearings in the realm of the history of religion. Here he was impeded, beyond all doubt, by his underestimate of the religion of the Old Testament, which, as the stage prefatory to Christianity, is possessed of characteristics analogous to those of Christianity itself. For, in the Old Testament no less, the concrete conception of the one, supernatural, omnipotent God is bound up with the final end of the Kingdom of God, and with the idea of a redemption. But that end is conceived under the limits of the national commonwealth; while the condition of the end being realised is conceived, it is true, as purification from sin, but partly also under the garb of the chosen people’s political independence; partly it is accompanied by the hope of outward prosperity destined to arrive with the perfect rule of Jehovah. In Christianity, the Kingdom of God is represented as the common end of God and the elect community, in such a way that it rises above the natural limits of nationality and becomes the moral society of nations. In this respect Christianity shows itself to be the perfect moral religion. Redemption through Christ—an idea which embraces justification and renewal—is also divested of all conditions of a natural or sensuous kind, so as to culminate in the purely spiritual idea of eternal life. Nor do the outwardly sensible circumstances, amidst which Christ’s passion took place, affect its redeeming significance. That significance attaches to His willing acceptance of His sufferings, to the obedience which, under these circumstances, He displayed in His God-given vocation. And inasmuch as redemption through Christ comprises justification and renewal, what is obtained is such an emancipation from evils as, being a spiritual process, is specifically distinct from Old Testament anticipations.

In both these respects we have in Christianity a culmination of the monotheistic, spiritual, and teleological religion of the Bible in the idea of the perfected spiritual and moral religion. There can be no doubt that these two characteristics condition each other mutually. Christ made the universal moral Kingdom of God His end, and thus He came to know and decide for that kind of redemption which He achieved through the maintenance of fidelity in His calling and of His blessed fellowship with God through suffering unto death. On the other hand, a correct spiritual interpretation of redemption and justification through Christ tends to keep more decisively to the front the truth that the Kingdom of God is the final end. Now theology, especially within the Evangelical Confessions, has laid very unequal emphasis on these two principal characteristics of Christianity. It makes everything which concerns the redemptive character of Christianity an object of the most solicitous reflection. Accordingly it finds the central point of all Christian knowledge and practice in redemption through Christ, while injustice is done to the ethical interpretation of Christianity through the idea of the Kingdom of God. But Christianity, so to speak, resembles not a circle described from a single centre, but an ellipse which is determined by two foci. Western Catholicism has recognised this fact in its own way. For it sets itself up not merely as an institution possessed of the sacraments by which the power of Christ’s redemption is propagated, but also as the Kingdom of God in the present, as the community in which, through the obedience of men and States to the Pope, Divine righteousness is professedly realised. Now it has been a misfortune for Protestantism that the Reformers did not purify the idea of the moral Kingdom of God or Christ from sacerdotal corruptions, but embodied it in a conception which is not practical but merely dogmatical. Apart from Zwingli, whose views on this point are peculiar to himself, Luther, Melanchthon,⁹ and Calvin define the Kingdom of Christ as the inward union between Christ and believers through grace and its operations. The dogmatic theologians of both Confessions unanimously propagate this view by deriving an argument for religious consolation from the protection against powers hostile to redemption enjoyed by believers in the Kingdom of Christ. Kant (vol. i. 412 ff.) was the first to perceive the supreme importance for ethics of the “Kingdom of God” as an association of men bound together by laws of virtue. But it remained for Schleiermacher first to employ the true conception of the teleological nature of the Kingdom of God to determine the idea of Christianity. This service of his ought not to be forgotten, even if he failed to grasp the discovery with a firm hand. For none of the theologians who found in him their master, with the exception of Theremin,¹⁰ has taken account of the importance of this idea for systematic theology as a whole. Modern pietists are accustomed to describe their favourite undertakings, especially foreign missions, directly as the Kingdom of God; but in doing so, while they touch upon the ethical meaning of the idea, they narrow its reference improperly. This circle, too, have brought the word into use, e.g. to describe the public affairs of the Church as discussed in periodicals. This use of the name, however, involves that interchange of “Church” and “Kingdom of God” which we find dominating Roman Catholicism.

Since Jesus Himself, however, saw in the Kingdom of God the moral end of the religious fellowship He had to found (vol. ii. p. 28); since He understood by it not the common exercise of worship, but the organisation of humanity through action inspired by love, any conception of Christianity would be imperfect and therefore incorrect which did not include this specifically teleological aspect. We must further remember that Christ did not describe this moral task, to be carried out by the human race, in the form of a philosophical doctrine, and propagate it in a school: He entrusted it to His disciples. At the same time He constituted them a religious community through training of another kind. For when good action towards our fellow-men is subsumed under the conception of the Kingdom of God, this whole province is placed under the rule and standard of religion. And so, were we to determine the unique quality of Christianity merely by its teleological element, namely, its relation to the moral Kingdom of God, we should do injustice to its character as a religion. This aspect of Christianity, clearly, is meant to be provided for in Schleiermacher’s phrase—“in which everything is referred to the redemption wrought by Jesus.” For redemption is a presupposition of the Christian’s peculiar dependence on God; but dependence on God is, for Schleiermacher, the general form of religious experience as distinct from a moral relationship. Now it is true that in Christianity everything is “related” to the moral organisation of humanity through love-prompted action; but at the same time everything is also “related” to redemption through Jesus, to spiritual redemption, i.e. to that freedom from guilt and over the world which is to be won through the realised Fatherhood of God. Freedom in God, the freedom of the children of God, is the private end of each individual Christian, as the Kingdom of God is the final end of all. And this double character of the Christian life—perfectly religious and perfectly ethical—continues, because its realisation in the life of the individual advances through the perpetual interaction of the two elements. For the life and activity of the Founder of Christianity issued at once in the redemption and the setting up of the Kingdom of God. The same fidelity in His Divine vocation enabled Him to preserve and secure both His own fellowship with the Father, and the power to lead sinners back into the same fellowship with God; and the same effect has two aspects—His disciples acknowledge Him as the Head of the Kingdom of God, and God as their Father.

Christianity, then, is the monotheistic, completely spiritual, and ethical religion, which, based on the life of its Author as Redeemer and as Founder of the Kingdom of God, consists in the freedom of the children of God, involves the impulse to conduct from the motive of love, aims at the moral organisation of mankind, and grounds blessedness on the relation of sonship to God, as well as on the Kingdom of God.

This conception is indispensable for systematic theology if the material correctly obtained from Biblical ideas is to be fully used. The history of theology affords only too many examples of the construction of what is either merely a doctrine of redemption or merely a system of morality. But it must also be observed that we are not to base theology proper on the idea of redemption, and ethics upon the idea of the Kingdom of God. On the contrary, so far as theology falls into these two sections, each must be kept under the constitutive influence of both ideas. Dogmatics, that is, comprises all the presuppositions of Christianity under the form of Divine operation; ethics, presupposing the former discipline, comprises the province of personal and social Christian life under the form of personal activity.¹¹ Now since the revelation of God is directed not only to the goal of redemption, but also to the final end of the kingdom which He realises in fellowship with the redeemed, dogmatics cannot dispense with the latter guiding idea. And as the spiritual activity of those who are called to the Kingdom of God and redeemed does not manifest itself merely in their moral influence on others, but also in the peculiar functions of Divine sonship, ethics must be conditioned likewise by the idea of redemption.

§ 3. The scientific understanding of the several truths of Christianity depends on their correct definition. The first task of systematic theology is correctly and completely to outline and clearly to settle the religious ideas or facts which are included in the conception of Christianity. The so-called proof from Scripture has to do with the correctness of these ideas, but it does not really yield more than the correctness of the ideas of Christianity in their original sense. Theological form, however, requires that their correctness should be of another kind. And so we cannot reach dogmatic definitions simply by summing up the exegetical results of Biblical Theology. For the writers of the New Testament are not in the least guided by the wish to define their ideas; and when, as in Heb. xi. 1, we have for once a tendency to definition, yet the definition is not complete. The ideas of Christ and of the apostles, which we regard off-hand as substantially in agreement, often enough employ divergent means of expression, or link themselves to different Old Testament symbols. Now exegesis itself, certainly, deals with many particular passages in such a way as to reduce the cognate symbolical expressions they contain to one conception of the greatest possible clearness. For in part exegesis must view the particular in the light of its relationship to everything which resembles it, in part it has to fill up the chasm between our way of thinking and the Israelites’ symbolical manner of speech, in part its task is to clear away false ideas forced upon certain Biblical symbols by exegetical tradition. Under these circumstances, the exposition of religious ideas furnished by Biblical Theology, which supplies the matter of theological knowledge, itself contains attempts to define these ideas. But it gives no guarantee that they are completely and distinctly defined in organic relation to the whole. Each definition can only be made complete as it receives its place in a system of theology, for the truth of the particular can be understood only through its connection with the whole. This gives us the certainty that theological propositions, which have been defined with logical correctness, are not mutually contradictory.¹²

The formally correct expression of theological propositions depends on the method we follow in defining the objects of cognition, that is, on the theory of knowledge which we consciously or unconsciously obey. The theory of knowledge, in the sense here intended, is identical with ” the doctrine of the thing or things ” ¹³ which forms the first part of metaphysics.¹⁴ Different philosophers interpret metaphysics differently. I have therefore explained elsewhere what I mean when I use the word metaphysics by reference to Aristotle, whose usage determined philosophical terminology until Kant. And I cannot refrain from repeating that explanation here. ” First Philosophy,” according to Aristotle, ” is devoted to an investigation of the universal grounds of all being. Now the things with which our knowledge deals are divided into nature and spiritual life. When we are investigating the grounds common to all being, we abstract from the particular qualities which constitute for us the difference between nature and spirit, and enable us to regard them as heterogeneous entities. Natural and spiritual phenomena concern metaphysics only in so far as they may be conceived as things in general. For the conditions of knowledge common to them both are crystallised in the conception of ‘the thing.’ Thus metaphysical conceptions, it is true, include and regulate all other acts of knowledge which involve the specific peculiarity of nature and of spirit. They explain how it is that the human mind, having had experientially perceptions of special kinds, differentiates things in consequence into natural things and spiritual beings. But it does not follow from the position of metaphysics as superordinate to experiential knowledge, that metaphysical conceptions give us a more profound and valuable knowledge of spiritual existence than can be gained from psychology and ethics.” Compared with natural science and ethics, metaphysics yields elementary and merely formal knowledge. If others understand by metaphysics: not that elementary knowledge of things in general which ignores their division into nature and spirit, but such a universal theory as shall be at once elementary and the final and exhaustive science of all particular ordered existence, they do so at their own risk. At any rate my method is neither unjust nor unhistorical when I explain, with express reference to Aristotle, what extent of knowledge I include under the name. For in the last resort the question is one more of the thing than of the name.

The first consequence of this is, that there are no sufficient grounds for combining a theory of things in general with the conception of God. That is done, however, when Aristotle gives the name God to the idea of the highest end which he postulates as winding up the cosmic series of means and ends, and so as an expression of the unity of the world. This conjunction of the two forms the content of the teleological argument for God’s existence constructed by Scholastic theology. We have a similar case in the cosmological argument. It exhibits a metamorphosis of the Neoplatonic view of the world, which rests merely upon the idea of things and their causal connection. Now in religion the thought of God is given. But the religious view of the world, in all its species, rests on the fact that man in some degree distinguishes himself in worth from the phenomena which surround him and from the influences of nature which press in upon him. All religion is equivalent to an explanation of the course of the world—to whatever extent it may be known—in the sense that the sublime spiritual powers (or the spiritual power) which rule in or over it, conserve and confirm to the personal spirit its claims and its independence over-against the restrictions of nature and the natural effects of human society. Thus the thought of God, when by the word is understood conscious personality, lies beyond the horizon of metaphysic, as metaphysic is defined above. And both these proofs for God’s existence, whose construction is purely metaphysical, lead not to the Being the idea of which Scholastic theology receives as a datum from Christianity, but merely to conceptions of the world-unity which have nothing to do with any religion. This use of metaphysic, consequently, must be forbidden in theology, if the latter’s positive and proper character is to be maintained.¹⁵

A theory of ” things ” is employed merely formally in theology as a method of settling the objects of knowledge, and defining the relation between the multiplicity of their qualities and the unity of their existence. The rules which it is possible to set up here form the conditions of experience by means of which the specific nature of things is cognised. In the theory of things it is taken for granted that our Ego is not of itself the cause of sensations, perceptions, etc., but that these peculiar activities of the soul are stimulated by its coexistence with things of which the human body is also reckoned one. Accordingly, ontology and psychology mutually presuppose each other, and their results harmonise. This is so even if the conceptions of thing and soul are denied in their current sense. For Buddhism concedes the validity of each of these entities only as a multiplicity of qualities or sensations, in which there is supposed to be no normal identity or self-equivalence.¹⁶ Heraclitus has a similar thought, but it found no acceptance among the Greeks. Within the domain of European thought, however, we have to do with three forms of the theory of knowledge. The first is due to the stimulus received from Plato, and found a home in the realm of Scholasticism.¹⁷ Wherever its influence extends, we find the idea that the thing works upon us, indeed, by means of its mutable qualities, arousing our sensations and ideas, but that it really is at rest behind the qualities as a permanently self-equivalent unity of attributes. The simplest example of this view to be found in Scholastic dogmatics is the explication given on the one hand of the essence and attributes of God, and on the other of the operations of God upon the world and for the salvation of mankind. Here there may still be seen an idea which is peculiar to this theory—the idea that we can know the thing in itself apart from its effects. The fact is forgotten that the thing in itself is merely the stationary memory-picture of repeated intuitions of effects by which our sensation and perception have been stimulated all along within one definite space. The fault of this conception of the thing or object of knowledge appears in the inconsistency that the thing is conceived to be at rest and at the same time is to work upon us by its manifested qualities. This inconsistency makes itself apparent in yet another form, when the thing, as at rest, is represented as occupying a plane behind the plane in which its supposed qualities are placed. This makes it impossible to understand these phenomena as qualities of the thing in itself thus separated from them. The second form of the theory of knowledge we owe to Kant. He limits the knowledge of the understanding to the world of phenomena, but declares unknowable the thing or things in themselves, though their interdependent changes are the ground of the changes in the world of phenomena. The latter part of the statement contains a true criticism of the Scholastic interpretation of a ” thing.” The first part, however, is too near the Scholastic theory to avoid its errors. For a world of phenomena can be posited as the object of knowledge only if we suppose that in them something real—to wit, the thing—appears to us or is the cause of our sensation and perception. Otherwise the phenomenon can only be treated as an illusion. Thus by his use of the conception of phenomenon Kant contradicts his own principle that real things are unknowable. The third form of the theory of knowledge is due to Lotze. He holds that in the phenomena which in a definite space exhibit changes to a limited extent and in a determinate order, we cognise the thing as the cause of its qualities operating upon us, as the end which these serve as means, as the law of their constant changes. I have essayed a discussion and proof of this theory, with which I agree, in my little book, Theologie und Metaphysik, to which I hereby refer the reader.

Theology has to do, not with natural objects, but with states and movements of man’s spiritual life; in our arrangement of the conceptions which belong to theology, accordingly, we must leave a place for psychology. Here there are two colliding views, which correspond respectively to the first and the third forms of the theory of knowledge. With the idea of the thing as remaining at rest behind its effects and qualities is bound up the Scholastic psychology, which is a principal factor in the theory of mysticism. Its assumption is, that behind its special activities of feeling, thinking, and willing, the soul remains at rest in its self-equivalence, as the unity of its diverse powers, the faculties. This level of the soul’s existence, further, is regarded as the region in which it experiences the operations of Divine grace. This self-enclosed life of the spirit, above all, is conceived as the scene of the unio mystica, that indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in which culminate all the gracious operations which our spirit undergoes. Nothing else, it is maintained, can explain how the changing functions of the spirit, its feeling, knowing, and willing, take on throughout a religious character, and become active in the service of God. This separation between the activities of the soul and its self-existence having been enlisted in the service of theology, it becomes observable in the method of Dogmatics after the middle of the seventeenth century.¹⁸ Now this theology culminates in its scheme of individual salvation, which dominates likewise the doctrines of the Church and of the Christian hope. Consequently what it has to prove is that, besides the enlightenment of the understanding, and the renewal of the will, there occurs an invisible union with God at the basis of the soul—i.e. within the region of its self-existence—a union which is the ground of blessedness, even when, as quietistic mysticism bids us add, the feeling of blessedness is interrupted or in great degree fails. The separation of the activities of the soul from its unaffected faculties, thus introduced into the more modern form of orthodox theology, is an error of the same kind as the distinction between the phenomenal effects of a thing and the thing in itself, unknowable as the latter is apart from its qualities. We know nothing of a self-existence of the soul, of a self-enclosed life of the spirit above or behind those functions in which it is active, living, and present to itself as a being of special worth.¹⁹ It is a contradiction when the faculties of the soul are supposed to exercise their effects, and at the same time to constitute in repose the proper being of the soul thus cut off from its functions. Besides, the conception of the unio mystica, which without this false distinction is untenable, lies outside the horizon of our Church standards. To the question: Quid est habere deum? Luther answers, not: Inhabitatio totius trinitatis in homine credente: he answers with psychological correctness that for man the possession of God consists in his active trust in God as the highest good. While, therefore, God communicates Himself to man in order to his salvation, the experience is not an object of knowledge in such a way as to be fixed and explained in this form; rather it is evidenced by an activity of the human spirit in which feeling, knowing, and willing combine in an intelligible order.

For all causes which affect the soul work upon it as stimuli of the special activity with which it is endowed. The relation of the soul to all the causes which work upon it is not one of simple passivity: all actions upon it, rather, it takes up in its sensation, as a reaction in which it manifests itself as an independent cause. The use of passive predicates to describe the human spirit is always an inaccurate mode of speech. Pain, which represents suffering in the soul, exists only in sensation; sensation, however, is the elementary act by which the soul makes it known that it is reacting in its own way upon the stimulus received from another cause; and through the feeling of discomfort it represents to itself the fact that the painful sensation, corresponding to the stimulus, is a disturbance of its condition as a whole. Now sensations are not only the material of feelings of pain or pleasure, but likewise the necessary occasions of ideas and other acts of knowledge; feelings, further, are the immediate impulses leading to acts of will. All causes, therefore, which act upon the soul, are only excitations of the soul’s activity, which even in sensation, as the element from which all else is born, reveals itself as independent and distinctive. Now the peculiarity of the soul, in comparison with other causes, is expressed by the dissimilarity between the sensation and the stimulus which causes it. Sensations of light and sound, indeed, are something quite different from the experimentally ascertained vibrations of the aether and the air by which these sensations are called forth. The sensation of pain is unlike the antecedents which arouse it, for it is the same whether one is struck or pushed or falls upon a stone. The sense of wrong may attach itself to the words of another who, probably with all sincerity, disclaims the intention to offend. From this fundamental rule of psychology, there devolves on scientific theology the task of verifying everything which is cognisable as belonging to the gracious operations of God upon the Christian, by the corresponding religious and moral acts which are called forth by Revelation as a whole, and by the particular means included in Revelation. We must give up the question—derived from Scholastic psychology, but insoluble—how man is laid hold of, or pervaded, or filled by the Holy Spirit. What we have to do is rather to verify life in the Holy Spirit by showing that believers know God’s gracious gifts (1 Cor. ii. 12), that they call on God as their Father (Rom. viii. 15), that they act with love and joy, with meekness and self-control (Gal. v. 22), that they are on their guard above all against party spirit, and cherish rather a spirit of union (1 Cor. iii. 1–4). In these statements the Holy Spirit is not denied, but recognised and understood. Nor is this method of procedure anything new. On the contrary, it has been employed by Schleiermacher, and the explanation of justification by faith to be found in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession follows the same plan. If Christianity is to be made practically intelligible, no method but this can be adopted. For Christianity is made unintelligible by those formulas about the order of individual salvation, which are arrived at on the opposite view and prescribed to faith without a directly appended explanation of their practical relations and their verification. Luthardt declines to grant that divergences between different forms of theology are to be traced back to differences in epistemology and psychology. He prefers to argue that these divergences point to different kinds of Christianity. Waiving the fact that thus he erroneously confuses theology and religion, I can agree with him thus far, that the Christianity which is expounded with the help of Scholastic ontology and mystical psychology is unintelligible and Neoplatonic, while with the other method it is an intelligible and practical Christianity that is set forth.

The principles of logic, epistemology, and psychology constitute the ratio or intellectus without which, in Hollatz’ judgment, Divine Revelation cannot be comprehended at all, and in any case cannot be made the subject of theological exposition. He adds very convincingly: Sicut enim sine oculis nihil videmus, sine auribus nihil audimus, ita sine ratione nihil intelligimus.²⁰ But the controversy regarding the metaphysic and psychology which are admissible in theology compels us to limit this principle. As we hear only with our own ears, and see only with our own eyes, so we can understand only with our own mind, not with that of another. But the Scholastic distinction between the thing in itself and its effects upon us, between the proper life of the spirit and its active functions, is alien to our minds. For it might easily be shown that even those theologians who in their scientific work go by this distinction, judge elsewhere of things and persons by principles which they would declare invalid in theology. The correct forms of the understanding, no less than the Scholastic forms, are subject to the truth of the principle that Revelation goes beyond reason (revelatio supra rationem). Revelation must be given in order that our experience of it may be apprehended and interpreted with ontological, logical, and psychological correctness. For if that principle meant anything else than this, it would contradict the defence of ratio in theology as offered above. Ratio, however, is given a different signification when the further principle is asserted that revelation goes contrary to reason (contra rationem). By reason here is meant a connected view of the world which interprets the order of nature and spiritual life with instruments of knowledge which have no relation to Christianity. The Christian view of the world and of life is opposed, therefore, both to that produced by Materialism and to those views which are presented in systems of monistic Idealism. These, however, are not the only cases in which this principle may be applied.

Theology has performed its task when, guided by the Christian idea of God and the conception of men’s blessedness in the Kingdom of God, it exhibits completely and clearly, both as a whole and in particular, the Christian view of the world and of human life, together with the necessity which belongs to the interdependent relations between its component elements. It is incompetent for it to enter upon either a direct or an indirect proof of the truth of the Christian Revelation by seeking to show that it agrees with some philosophical or juridical view of the world; for to such Christianity simply stands opposed. And as often as systems even of monistic Idealism have asserted their agreement with Christianity, and its leading ideas have been worked up into a general philosophic view, the result has only been to demonstrate over again the opposition between even such systems and Christianity. The scientific proof for the truth of Christianity ought only to be sought in the line of the thought already singled out by Spener: “Whosoever willeth to do the will of God, will know that the doctrine of Christ is true” (John vii. 17). Here it is indicated that Christianity can be verified, not when our aim is to understand the domain of spiritual life and of social human action by means of universal grounds of speculation, but only when we mark off the knowledge of that domain from the knowledge of nature and her laws. To subordinate the ethical to the idea of the cosmical is always characteristic of a heathen view of the world, and to its jurisdiction Christianity is not amenable; before it Christianity will never succeed in justifying itself. Even when such an explanation of the world starts from an idea of God, it offers no guarantee that it can prove the truth of Christianity. Christianity includes as one of its elements the distinction of the ethical from the world of nature in respect of worth, inasmuch as it attaches blessedness for man, as the highest and all-dominating notion of worth, to participation in the Kingdom of God and lordship over the world. The theological exposition of Christianity, therefore, is complete when it has been demonstrated that the Christian ideal of life, and no other, satisfies the claims of the human spirit to knowledge of things universally.

§ 4. These presuppositions of systematic theology of necessity lie within the horizon of the following monograph, for (§ 13) everything that falls within the domain of redemption through Christ must be referred to the supreme end of blessedness in the Kingdom of God, if it is to be understood as a necessary element in the Christian view. The exposition of the doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation is given here in four principal sections. First, we ascertain what is meant by justification and reconciliation; through what attribute of God we are to conceive justification, in what relation to men, and how far extending; finally, in what subjective functions this Divinely-originated relationship expresses itself actively. Secondly, we develop the positive and negative presuppositions of the religious truth of justification, the idea of God, the view that is to be taken of human sin, and the religious estimate of the Person and lifework of Christ. Thirdly, we prove why the thought of justification by faith is necessary at all in Christianity, and why justification is dependent on Christ as the Revealer of God and the Representative of the Church. Fourthly, we show, by way of conclusion, why justification manifests itself precisely in those religious functions which come into view, and what the relation is between them and moral activity.

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← Author’s Prefaces · Contents · Chapter I. The Definition of Justification →

Footnotes

1. I refer to Kreibig’s work, Die Versöhnungslehre auf Grund des christlichen Bewusstseins dargestellt (Berlin, 1878). In the introduction he identifies, in a trice, the authority of the Bible and the Church with his Christian consciousness, deduces the method of reconciliation before proving the act of reconciliation, and on p. 242 betrays his rationalism by recognising belief in a twofold Divine recompense—which he affirms is the content of the biblical idea of righteousness—as an idea common to all men, and present originally in the moral consciousness. In his scattered and often falsified representation of my views, Kreibig’s method is to concede to me in one breath what previously and subsequently he disputes. He ignores altogether the researches in Biblical Theology contained in my second volume, but continues to assure us cheerfully that his assumptions are based on Scripture without even in a single word mentioning what I have proved to the contrary. ↩

2. “Quid est habere deum aut quid est deus? Deus est et vocatur, de cuius bonitate et potentia omnia bona certo tibi pollicearis et ad quem quibuslibet adversis rebus atque periculis ingruentibus confugias, ut deum habere nihil aliud sit, quam illi ex toto corde fidere et credere … Siquidem haec duo, fides et deus una copula coniungenda sunt.” ↩

3. “Qui scit, se per Christum habere propitium patrem, is vere novit deum”; further, in the Apology, iii. 20: “Per Christum acceditur ad patrem, et accepta remissione peccatorum vere iam statuimus, nos habere deum, hoc est nos deo curae esse, invocamus, agimus gratias, timemus, diligimus.” II. 34: “Humanus animus sine spiritu sancto (outside the community of believers) aut securus contemnit iudicium dei, aut in poena fugit et odit iudicantem deum.” II. 18: “Ratio nihil facit, nisi quaedam civilia opera, interim neque timet deum, neque vere credit se deo curae esse.” ↩

4. Cf. Theologie und Metaphysik, p. 57 ff. (2nd ed. p. 61 ff.). ↩

5. In the Apol. C. A. v. 53, it is true, we meet with the formula which Melanchthon in the Visitationsbuch defended against Agricola’s objections: Lex ostendit, arguit, et condemnat peccata. Evangelium est promissio gratiae. This formula indicates that the ground for our knowledge of sin lies outside faith in Christ. But Luther admitted this only in the sense that general saving faith is included in the law (vol. i. p. 201). ↩

6. Cf. Geschichte des Pietismus, ii. p. 117 ff. ↩

7. Pia desideria and Allgemeine Gottesgelahrtheit (1680), i. p. 36. Consilia, iii. p. 54. ↩

8. Glaubenslehre, § 9, 2: “Whatever in the domain of Christianity belongs to our consciousness of God, must also be referred, through the idea of a kingdom of God, to the totality of our activities … This figure of ‘the Kingdom of God,’ so significant, so all-inclusive in Christianity, is only a general expression of the fact that in Christianity all pain and all joy are religious only in so far as they are related to activity in the Kingdom of God, and that every pious emotion, which arises from a passive state, ends in the consciousness of a transition to activity.” ↩

9. Once, however, in the Apology of the C. A. iii. 68, 71, 72, he expresses the true idea. Similarly Luther, in his Smaller Catechism, sec. 2, art. 2, with which the parallel statement in his Larger Catechism really agrees. ↩

10. Die Lehre vom göttlichen Reiche (1823), p. 2: “Although, in view of the great multiplicity of moral ideas contained in Christianity, it is difficult to discover the most comprehensive, yet it is impossible not to perceive that its highest ideal is a society, and that its doctrines and precepts become luminous only when they are subordinated and related to it. For as a unity of essence and a moral unity of spirit exists eternally between the Father and the Son, so the Son must likewise become the Head of all humanity, in order that it may be raised to the perfection which is to be seen in Him, and be led through Him into a fellowship with the Father similar to that in which He Himself lives. This union is appropriately named the Kingdom of God.” P. 4: “When we consider the relation of God to man, and the work of redemption in the light of this idea, many doctrinal conceptions lose the appearance of arbitrariness which they may have, and gain a closer connection and a firmer foundation.” ↩

11. Cf. Schleiermacher, Christliche Sitte, p. 23; Nitzsch, System der christlichen Lehre (6th ed.), p. 4; Harless, Christliche Ethik (6th ed.), p. 3. ↩

12. Cf. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, i. p. 5. By science is understood in ordinary usage a system of propositions, the elememts of which are conceptions, i.e. ideas completely determined, constant, and universally valid throughout the whole connection of thought. The conjunctions of ideas in the system must be based in fact; and finally, its parts must be combined into a whole to facilitate teaching, either because a part of reality is completely construed in thought by this combination of propositions, or because some branch of human activity is determined by it. ↩

13. Die Lehre von dem Dinge und den Dingen. ↩

14. With what follows compare my pamphlet, Theologie und Metaphysik: zur Verständigung und Abwehr, Bonn, 1881; 2nd ed., 1887. ↩

15. Flügel’s instructive book, Die speculative Theologie der Gegenwart, kritisch beleuchtet (1881), has not convinced me that the rational theology involved in Herbart’s metaphysics is right as against the arguments I have given above. Though the task of this metaphysic, according to Flügel (p. 323), may be quite the same as that of natural science, since it aims at exhibiting that which is given as free from contradiction, yet it moves within the limits of a conception of things, their multiplicity and their interaction, which is abstract and indifferent to the distinction between nature and spirit. Such a context offers us no prospect of any conception of God which might even resemble the Christian idea. When, with Herbart, Flügel uses the purposive nexus of things, as ascertained by experience, as a ground for the probability of a creative intelligence, that is, of God, the result he reaches is neither necessary from the standpoint of scientific knowledge, nor capable of being used as the starting-point of a philosophy of religion which should be just to Christianity. The latter assertion is confirmed, indeed, by the most important arguments of Flügel’s book. For by his criticism of views which make the necessity of the thought of God equivalent to scientific knowledge of His reality, he shuts out the metaphysical argument of probability for His existence. ↩

16. Cf. Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 253 ff. ↩

17. Cf. Theologie und Metaphysik, p. 30 ff. (2nd ed., p. 32 ff.). ↩

18. Geschichte des Pietismus, ii. p. 29. ↩

19. Theologie und Metaphysik, p. 23 (2nd ed., p. 25). ↩

20. Examen theologicum, p. 69. ↩