The most general reason why naturalistic and rationalistic tendencies in theology were able to raise themselves against the supernatural and traditionary character of the Christian religion, is to be found in that strangest actual result of the religious movements of the sixteenth century, namely, in the manifold divisions of the Western Church. In the first stage of those movements distinct germs of a rationalistic tendency show themselves in the mystical individualism of the Anabaptists. This party was the congenial soil on which the rationalistic theology of Socinus could flourish. That party succeeded in establishing itself as soon as the prospect of the restoration of the Church’s unity failed. Now, although the other portions of the Church which, by the support of political powers gained a secured existence, maintained no small measure of harmony one with another in their positive apprehension of Christianity, yet none of these ecclesiastical parties had that preponderance of authority, in virtue of which an ecclesiastical stamp had been impressed on all spiritual movements in the middle ages, even on those which were heretical. The philosophical systems, therefore, which were elaborated in the two centuries subsequent to the Reformation, led to such a culture of the reason as indeed, on the whole, asserted sympathy with Church Christianity, but no longer recognised the direct aim of serving the Church and proving all its dogmas.

The divisions of the Church, however, not only lessened its influence upon the course of culture, it also had effects opposed to culture; for religious war arose from the separation of Church-parties and their alliances with political powers. This worst kind of war overran successively France, Germany, England. Under the impression produced by this mischief, and recollection of its origin, there arose, in persons of fine moral sensibilities and of religious earnestness, indifference and even disinclination to the positive dogmatic development of Christianity, and also even to its historical limitation. The diversity of dogmatic systems had brought in its train not merely learned strife and social alienations, but also along with war the demoralization of the people,—a result the opposite of what religion aims at. The impulse to seek a remedy for this was not satisfied, however, with striving after the primitive and dogmatically indifferent form of Christianity, because every Church pretended, in virtue of its own dogma, to be in harmony with that; but it directed itself rather to the task of discovering that natural religion which stands above all positive religions, because the theology of all parties pointed men to this neutral basis which was common to them all. In this a peculiar Nemesis visits Christian theology. In the very earliest stages of its history men had commended Christianity to the culture of the heathen by assertions that it was in correspondence with the natural inclination of the reason towards Monotheism, and that its law was no other than the natural moral law. It was, in fact, only in very limited philosophical circles of thought,—the later Platonic and the Stoical namely,—that these assumptions had a positive historical basis. They were therefore pressed too far when they were asserted to be objects of the common consciousness of the human spirit; and, moreover, the specific diversity between the Christian thought and the similarly sounding thoughts of heathenism was overlooked, their analogy to one another being regarded as actual coincidence. Without the error being discovered, the theology of the middle ages, as well as that of Protestantism, continued to assert that the world’s reasoning and observation, while still uninfluenced by special revelation, produces the same thought of God as that which Christianity conveys; and that this thought, along with the natural consciousness of the law of love which each one possesses, constitutes the basis of theology, to which revelation adds only special and stronger securities of salvation. Do those men deserve reproach, from the standpoint of orthodoxy, who contented themselves with the natural bases of all religion after the special securities drawn from Divine revelation had come to appear as if they served precisely for man’s undoing? They indeed only stretch further the fiction by which Christianity at first had made clear its universal significance for human culture, and by means of which the reasonableness of its contents (which were not differently stated then) had been scientifically demonstrated; thus here also could the unreasonableness of its divided condition be proved!

The first literary advocacy of theological naturalism was undertaken (still in a disguised form), under the impression produced by the religious war in France, by John Bodinus,³ the jurisconsult, who was himself a Catholic. He is undeniably the representative of a tone that widely prevailed amongst his countrymen in the sixteenth century. From this atmosphere the Englishman, Edward Herbert of Cherbury, derived the impulse to the first open systematic exhibition of the contents of the religion of nature,⁴ which is, according to him, the useful kernel in every positive religion, and which at the hands of all of them has suffered many disfigurements. As we are exhorted to seek to disengage that kernel, it results that all revelation is superfluous, even though its reality be indisputable. The substantial tendency of this master is carried out in the whole literature which is comprehended under the general title of English Deism, although, so far as the formal scientific standpoint is concerned, it is not idealistic after Herbert, but sensualistic after Hobbes and Locke. But the opposition to positive and churchly Christianity in all the many-sidedness of the themes discussed by it, makes Herbert’s natural religion to be distinctly recognisable as the fundamental type of all the phases of that literature. This connexion subsists, because the similarity of the occasion, namely, the repulsive impression of religious war, called forth corresponding efforts. When, by the restoration of Charles, the religious war was brought to an end, and by the elevation to the throne of William of Orange its renewal was prevented, the deistic literature which belongs to this period attempts, by means of theory, to make impossible for the future all strife about religion. By simply referring to the work of Leechler, I may venture to excuse myself from giving special consideration to the literature of Deism, which, in fact, has for its problem not the atonement but the possibility of revelation. Its chief result is shown in the final reduction of Christianity to the religion of nature by means of the very assumptions in accordance with which orthodoxy had, in the converse way, asserted the identity of the two.⁵

49. It cannot be doubted that this English opposition literature contributed in a certain measure to the development of German Rationalism. Subsequent to the introduction into Germany (1741) of Tindal’s work by means of a translation, German theologians show their marked attention to this field of literature by numerous translations of deistical and anti-deistical works from the English, by notices respecting them, by independent polemic against Deism,⁶ and finally, by adoption of the model set before them. But this last result was only a consequence of a revulsion of feeling which had its sufficient causes in the state of culture at home. It is noteworthy that these did not arise from a preference for natural over positive religion, although one might be disposed to think so, judging by the analogies of France and England. For Germany by its thirty years’ religious war had suffered much more severely than had France and England in their similar visitations, and she was not, like them, summoned together to an independent and energetic political existence, but under the form of the Roman empire, which had become useless and untrue, continued to experience political disintegration. But instead of seeking in the religion of nature the healing of the differences between the religious parties, the man of greatest genius in that century since the peace of Westphalia, Leibnitz to wit, vainly exhausted himself only with projects for dogmatic union between the confessions of the empire. I will not here venture a decision, whether in this also we ought to detect a symptom of the weakness of the German people, along with the other symptoms which make the remembrance of that period so painful, or whether we ought not perhaps to recognise in it a token of that spiritual power which knows how to observe moderation, and due moderation. In any case it ought not to be overlooked that the German illumination never belies its descent from philosophical idealism; that it never exchanged this principle for the empirical and sensualistic principle of England and France; and that therefore it never through scepticism forgot its moral tendency, and that in this respect Kant’s philosophy, whatever else may be its opposition to the illumination, is at one with it.

The special cause of the reaction towards rationalism on the part of the theology of the Lutheran Church in Germany is the strong development which religious and ethical individualism received from Pietism and the Wolfian philosophy, in connexion with the fact that Church-consciousness nowhere found feebler expression than in the Lutheran confession. Even if a particular Church possessed fixity and continuity of historical existence, merely in virtue of the fact that it had perfectly reproduced the body of doctrine contained in the Bible in its confession drawn out on paper, the partisans of Lutheranism would still have no right on this principle to maintain that the Lutheran has precedence over all other Churches. For example, the thought of the Church is indeed rightly formulated as a whole in the Lutheran confessions; but, at the same time, it is not perfectly developed according to the standard of the New Testament; and the thought of election which dominates the religion of the Bible is in the formula concordiæ placed upon a slippery ground, from which of necessity it had to slide away, so that so far as the practice of Lutheranism is concerned it was as good as lost. But even if this were not so, it is at least childish to determine the value of a particular Church solely according to the theoretical superiority of the doctrine that passes current in it; for a multitude of other conditions must be realized before one particular Church can assert an honourable place in comparison with others. The paper god which has been made of the confession of the Lutheran Church has neither prevented the deep fall of that Church, nor has it again brought about its restoration, nor has it as an object of admiration for ill-instructed worshippers established confidence in the maintenance of the Lutheran Church amid all the difficulties by which it is surrounded. It is not sufficient for the existence of an evangelical Church that the confession should be used as a doctrinal law for its pastors; it is requisite also that it should be supported by the common feeling of all its members; that it for its part should be able to excite and keep alive this common feeling; finally, that this common feeling should by the constitution of the Church be authorized to exert itself in the maintenance of the Church. A legal independence of the Churches was neither attained nor aimed at by the Lutheran Church of Germany in its classical epoch; for the preliminary task was never finished of leading the “common rude man” by the preaching of law and gospel to conversion and faith. But even irrespective of the right of congregations to have a part in the active shaping of the Church, the common mind of the Church did not attain to maturity, because the thought of the Church was not developed into perfection out of the general fundamental idea, and was not brought into that connexion with the other fundamental thoughts of Protestantism, without which a sense of the value of religious fellowship is not elicited. Instead of this, preaching isolated the individual, while exhorting him to conversion by law and gospel, and while prescribing good works to him as necessary consequences of his faith, and as what thankfulness to God demands. The feast of the Supper isolated the individual, by the propositions that the sacrament is distinguished from preaching, inasmuch as through it pardoning grace is offered to the individual as such. The common praise of the Church was diverted from its proper purpose by a number of hymns, in which either the objective doctrine of the Church is laid down in rhyme, or a purely individual contemplation of self is elicited and expressed in the singular number. And if one observes what sort of Church-consciousness is exhibited in this the single form in which the Christian congregation takes an active part in Lutheran worship, the result is as follows. In the good Lutheran hymn-book of the Hanoverian Church,⁷ of all the hymns for Pentecost, at which is commemorated the first public spontaneous action of the community of believers, there is only one that amongst other things reminds us that by the Holy Ghost the people of all languages are gathered into one by faith; but this is only the echo of the mediæval hymn. And even this allusion takes no notice of the fundamental fact of Pentecost, that in the spirit of God the faithful recognised and praised the great works of God wrought through Christ, and by this act of confession took up their place in the history of the world in the presence of foreign witnesses. Instead of referring to this event, all the Whitsuntide hymns bear upon the regeneration of the individual, upon his enlightenment and consolation by the Holy Spirit, and upon the objective place of the Spirit in the Trinity. The hymns also which, in that hymn-book, directly relate to the Church say no more regarding it than that it is founded by the word of God and the sacraments, and that it affords opportunity for hearing God’s word preached.

It is clear that a strong impulse to religious individualism is given by orthodox Lutheranism, and that it was not Pietism which first produced that tendency in the Church.⁸ Indubitably that element during the period before Pietism found its counterpoise in Church customs, which essentially consisted in regularity of attendance at Church, personal or bodily presence at the preaching of the word, and participation in the sacraments; quite in correspondence with what the hymns in the hymn-book say of the value of the Church. This Church habit essentially maintained itself even long after rationalism had taken hold of the minds of men; it thus was not strong enough to prevent the revulsion thereto. Rather was it obviously favourable to the influence of rationalism that the members of the Church had no other Church consciousness than that they had to be patient hearers of sermons, and to take in their contents. If therefore the theologians and the preachers came to have rationalistic convictions, they were prevented neither by their own feelings nor by regard to their hearers from giving expression to their convictions in an official way, especially when the distance of the new theological conviction from the earlier one was very much concealed from both parties by the dignity attributed to the persons of those intrusted with the cure of souls. But, for this reason too, the theologians who first developed their rationalism, starting from the school of orthodoxy, made the transition without any shock; for originally not only did they connect Wolfian philosophy with orthodoxy, but, at the same time, also they were subject to the influence of Pietism. From Pietism they had derived that concern for the moral treatment of the individual subject, which in rationalism rejects the orthodox premisses; but which even in Pietism had begotten indifference towards dogmatic strictness and the connexion of the Church-system.

Pietism makes its appearance in many shapes. As a striving after personal holiness, and a peculiarly conditioned assurance of salvation, it moves between the extreme opposites of the churchly correct attitude of Spener and certain enthusiastic ecstatic manifestations.⁹ It is by Francke in Halle that the method of attaining to individual certainty of salvation is first worked out to that demand for penitential exercise which corresponds to the dogmatic premisses of Lutheranism in the locus de pœnitentia. But the thorough-going characteristic of Pietism is the great attention it bestows upon the religious and moral development of the individual in more intimate intercourse with those who are like-minded,—in the conventicle. Conventicles are innocuous to the Church only when the latter rests upon a very energetic and active community of feeling. Thus in Lutheranism, where the Church in this respect fell so far short of what was required of it, the Pietistic conventicles could only act in a disintegrating and destructive way against that whereby the members of the Church, as such, were still held together. Much less was it possible that from Pietism should proceed any reforming influence upon the church. The doctrine of the confessions, which was looked upon by official Lutheranism as the palladium of the existence of the Church, was indeed maintained in all essential points by the Pietistic theologians of the eighteenth century; and they are not guilty of the numerous heresies with which they were charged. Nay, more, I must repeat that the practice of penitential exercise, which was insisted upon by the men of Halle, really denotes an intention on their part to give effect to the Lutheran doctrine of pœnitentia, which up till that time had held a place merely on paper. But the attention of the isolated individual to his own religious and moral development, which has its roots in Lutheranism, seems to be only strengthened by this undertaking. Hence a line is taken up which is really hostile to the Church as a whole, inasmuch as it is no longer the general guarantees of the Church that constitute the framework for that individualism, but casual changing connexions with like-minded persons. The first advocates of rationalism in Germany, who at the period of their theological education also experienced Pietistic influences, were thus weaned from influences which a firm public churchism would have exercised. Of course the positive presuppositions and motives that produced theological rationalism were to be found in the Wolfian philosophy. Now, one may well ask the question, why the philosophy of Descartes, which at an earlier period amongst the theologians of the Low Countries had formed an alliance with orthodoxy, precisely as did the Wolfian at first among the theologians of Germany, did not, like it, lead to a heterodox development. Röll and others prove that the impulse thereto lay in Cartesianism also. But I cannot avoid conjecturing that the strong churchly public spirit, which both by reason of dogma and of constitution, was operative in the Reformed Church of the Low Countries, and was still specially active on account of the struggle with the Remonstrants, suppressed any inclination to rationalism which could arise from the Cartesian philosophy.

50. The rationalism of German theologians and their naturalism, which subsequently developed itself, spread their roots through the philosophy of Wolf into that of Leibnitz. But these germs of theological change are, in the case of Leibnitz, disguised beneath such a mode of contemplating the universe, as in its objective and universal character is comparable with the theology of the Church, and was by its author deliberately brought into friendly connexion therewith.¹⁰ The absolute teleology of that world, which is the work of God, and which is the best that could have been produced,—a teleology in which the smallest occurrence extends its influence to the remotest issues,—finds its proper force only in the moral world, the civitas Dei. All beings are created by God as centres of special activity, in such a way that in each one of these the order of the universe is mirrored, while their operations are so directed that they represent the All in a finite way; and accordingly the principle of all their action and passion lies in their spiritual souls. The spiritual freedom of these is never the absence of determination, but the absence of constraint and physical compulsion; it is spontaneity. For the body, and, through it, the whole material world, has no determining and impelling influence upon the soul; the appearance of this is produced merely by the circumstance that according to the parallelism that has been ordained by God between the movements of the soul and of the body, ideas representing the peculiar movements of the material world fill the soul. And the soul acts in accordance with these ideas, because at the same time in accordance with her own independent ideas she is able to exercise an activity on the world. This pre-established harmony of the factors that form the human individual thus guarantees the spontaneous freedom of that individual, in virtue of the conformity of all things with each other by the will and wisdom of God,—in virtue of the harmony between nature and grace, between God’s decrees and our foreseen actions, between all portions of matter, between what is past and what is future. From this hypothesis, therefore, Leibnitz derives the most decided faith in providence, while at the same time he enjoins humble and trustful exercise of freedom in accordance with reason and with the moral law of God, on the understanding that all the future is, without a doubt, determined, although we know not what has been decreed by God or why it has been decreed. Faith in Providence animates also Leibnitz’s philosophical principle,—that the world, as it is, is chosen and created by God as the best, and that the fact of sin, and of its prevalence among men, cannot be alleged to the contrary. For evil, as compared with good, may be regarded as zero, if the actual magnitudes of the kingdom of God are taken into consideration. And, as God could not avoid making the things of this world imperfect, and thus making men so that it should be possible for them to sin; and as He has permitted sin actually to take place, He holds moral evil in His hand, not regarding it indeed as the direct means of good, but as the conditio sine qua non of what is best.

That Leibnitz by these views does not abandon the strictest judgment of sin is proved by his recognition of the eternity of future punishment. Grotius and Hobbes, the originators of the science of natural law in the seventeenth century, who represented the State as the means, and the welfare of the individual as the end, regarded the idea of punishment within the State, accordingly, as having reference merely to the relative purposes of reforming or of deterring individuals. Leibnitz was able to prevent this view from extending to the religious theory of the universe¹¹ by means of his doctrine that the kingdom of God is an end to itself. From this it followed that, for the maintenance of order, there appertains to God a penal justice which has to regard merely retribution and not reformation. On the supposition of freedom, if a case occurs in which a will continues to persevere in sin, then the continuance of punishment for continued sin corresponds only to that fitness which satisfies wise observers, who in the ordering of the kingdom of God look for what shall betoken that it is an end to itself. The lot of endless punishment which falls upon some without any hope of reformation does not, however, give ground for any denial of the presupposition of the universe as being the best, for changes of individual parts to imperfection and to evil,—in other words, a perversion in certain parts—does not contravene the maintenance of the whole in the best condition, but in this case precisely subserves the ends of universal order. Leibnitz does not discuss the retributive justice of God in this application without recognising at the same time reward as one species of it as well as punishment. While he cannot avoid asserting this idea as the correlate of human freedom, he is still far from excluding thereby the Christian thought of grace; for he expressly recognises the difference of grade between nature and grace in that ordering of the moral world towards a definite purpose which he maintains.

Hence it may be also inferred that Leibnitz still leaves room for the doctrine of reconciliation, and his theological disciples, therefore, have expressly defended that doctrine. Still, he determined the thought of sin, particularly the relation between actual and original sin, otherwise than had been done in the doctrine of the Church; and in this way he so altered the premisses of the idea of reconciliation that the final rejection of the latter by disciples of Wolf is explicable. Leibnitz regards the generation of all animated being as a growth and reconstruction of an organic preformation, in which the germs of the soul lie previous to generation, as conversely he does not imagine any existence of souls without body. Accordingly he assumes that future human souls are contained in the semen, in such a way that from Adam downwards they have had existence in a sort of organism, and that, by a creative act of God, they are endowed with reason in the act of generation. From Adam onwards, therefore, human souls would have sin attaching to them; in relation to this sin, however, reason stood as a new perfection. By this asseveration, Leibnitz gives a turn to the idea of original sin which essentially diverges from the line of Protestant orthodoxy. He proposes the question, whether original sin by itself, without exhibiting its effects in sinful action, is enough for everlasting condemnation? For refusing to admit this result with respect to children who die unbaptized, he could appeal to authority in the Catholic and in the evangelical Church. But he thinks it a hard thing, moreover, to assert the eternal condemnation of those grown-up persons who, following the inclinations of corrupt nature, fall into sin without participating in any means of grace. For they have only done what they could not help doing. Leibnitz could not defend this position with the authority of evangelical theologians; Catholic divines, however, who were solicitous for the salvation of the heathen, offered support for the affirmation that where knowledge of Christ is wanting, God bestows blessedness on those who, so far as their human ability went, busied themselves in what was good. Leibnitz, indeed, concedes that those who have opportunity for repentance, but still show no goodness of will, can have no excuse; but he still raises the question why God should not bestow upon them goodness of will for their amelioration, but should even harden them in their evil will. While now he traces this to the influence of the circumstances which as such arise from the general concatenation of causes, he is able to escape the dilemma of the election and reprobation of individuals only by explaining that those who, in respect of original sin, are all alike, are yet not equally bad in respect of their particular freedom. Asserting an innate individual distinction between soul and soul, he finds that in respect of their natural disposition men incline more or less to diverse forms of the good and the bad, or to their opposites. In so far therefore as, in accordance with the arrangement of the whole world, men are introduced into different circumstances, which are favourable or unfavourable to the development of nobler qualities, they either fulfil a happy destiny by the grace of God, or come short of it. He is of opinion, therefore, that the election of an individual is not according to his excellence, but according to the conveniency between his individuality and God’s decree.

Leibnitz, indeed, would have it to be understood that he propounds these views only as a hypothesis in defence of the doctrine of divine providence; and he is very far from claiming any dogmatic value for them. But that he has abandoned the sequence of the Lutheran doctrine of original sin is shown also by the fact that he repudiates the assumption of the infinite demerit of sin in accounting for the eternity of punishment, remarking that he has not yet sufficiently pondered that statement to be able to give a verdict upon it. To him humanity irrespective of Christ is nothing more than the entirely homogeneous massa perditionis, in which the kind and degree of the actual sins of the individual are indifferent. He breaks the ban of this conception by concentrating attention on the relative position of individuals, which they take according to their peculiar disposition, according to the peculiar strength of their use of reason, and according to the circumstances in the moral world which have been ordained by providence. The thought of eternal punishment does not come up into view with him in connexion with passive and universal original sin, but as a threat that impends over continued actual sin. Finally, the thought of the world which, in spite of sin, is the best, because sin in comparison with the majesty of the kingdom of God appears as nothing, leads to a tone which is quite the opposite of that wherein the orthodox system manifests its credibility. Orthodox Protestantism has taken up and carried on the dualistic conception of the universe which prevailed in the middle ages, in the modification that life here and life beyond the grave are subject to quite opposite conditions. In accordance with this, ascetic literature kept up the impression that, in spite of redemption, we are always during our earthly life exposed to the hindrances of sin rather than raised above them, and that it is only in the future life that we are first to enjoy the manifest fruits of redemption. As that antithesis was neutralized, or at least considerably modified in Leibnitz’s conception of the present state of the universe, the tone of ascetic melancholy which by rights at least ought to have accompanied the orthodox system, was wholly exchanged for a tone which, with all humility, combined cheerful and assured confidence in the providence of God. Perhaps the inclinations of the generations which followed were alienated from Pietism, and also from orthodoxy, by nothing so much as by the circumstance that such a tone, through the influence of the philosophy of Leibnitz and of Wolf, became universal amongst the educated classes. For the tone of society is the atmosphere of the spirit’s life; and, just as all organic beings do not live in one climate, in like manner certain circles of thought lose all their convincing power when certain tones prevail. Leibnitz, also, in order to commend his theory of optimism, could not abstain from calling in fancy into regions which were unfathomable by exact knowledge, and which supplied nourishment to the disposition which was opposed to orthodoxy, all the more because the latter in this respect laid down very definite limits. Orthodoxy recognises earth only as the arena of the spirit’s history, and limits the individual’s capacity for development to the earthly life. Leibnitz denies that this is an article of faith in the strict sense of that word, and can appeal to others who have preceded him in the assumption that sin continues after the present life. But, as he thinks that a morally good conduct of life is similarly carried on in the life beyond the grave, he gives occasion to suppose that conversion also is possible after death; and in suggesting all the solar systems to be dwelling-places of blessed spirits, with a view to support his optimist conception of the world, he makes that conviction to depend upon the visionary and arbitrary conjecture, that in those unknown regions the quantitative relation between evil and good will be the reverse of that which one feels so painfully in the present earthly state, judging it by the usual standards. These are germs which attain to so luxuriant a growth in the illumination-period as to choke all serious judgment of the moral world upon principles of universal application. For, in truth, the thought of the world as the best is identical with that of the world as relatively bad; but it follows from this that, in adopting the hypothesis of Leibnitz, one becomes in a measure indifferent to sin, and ceases to possess the absolute standard wherewith to judge it.

These elements, however, contained in the Théodicée of Leibnitz, did not develop their destructive consequences until the Leibnitzian principles had been applied by Wolf to the problems of ethics in a more comprehensive way, but, at the same time, had been modified after a peculiar fashion. By other disciples of Leibnitz a still stricter conformity between his religious philosophy and the orthodox system was brought about than is set forth in the Théodicée. The identity of interest between orthodoxy and the Leibnitzian philosophy is particularly displayed in the defence with which J. G. Canz in Tübingen met the assault made by J. C. Dippel (Christianus Democritus) on the Church doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ. This once notorious man, whose mysticism exhibits just as strong a tendency to merge into rationalism as that of the Quakers, introduces into the discussion a previously unemployed argument against the idea of Christ’s penal satisfaction, and in this respect is the foregoer of the later theologians of the illumination. The pivots of Dippel’s view¹² are the idea current among the enthusiasts of the final conversion of the wicked in the other life (“restitution of all,”) and the transference to the relation between God and man of the relative idea of punishment which had become current for civil society in the Natural Law of that time. It is clear that that view of the final end of the human race favours the presupposition that God’s punishments as a whole are for reformation and not for retribution, that they have reference to the future amendment, and not to the past misdeed. Still, I conjecture that unless the culture of the time had offered as an assumption familiar to all the notion that the state and civil punishment have only relative significance, neither Dippel’s mystical devotion to the task of active sanctification and of perfect victory over personal sin, nor his theory of Apokatastasis would have called forth that sort of criticism to which he subjected the doctrine of reconciliation.

In particular, Dippel’s assertion that God’s purpose is to destroy sin, but not the sinner, corresponds to that relative idea of the state, which regards it as the means for the maintenance and well-being of individuals. In accordance with this, the traditionary attribute of God, which guarantees the destruction of the sinner, His wrath to wit, had to be partly denied, partly altered. Inasmuch as God is love, there is properly speaking no wrath in Him, or His wrath is nothing but a chastisement which flows from love, and which leads men to amend, although it does not take place without great pain. For as sins do no detriment to God’s perfection, and cannot hurt or injure Him, but only bring disadvantage to man himself in his relation to God, God has no occasions to take heed of sins committed or demand satisfaction for them, but only in love will He direct His attention to them in order that for the future we to our own advantage may lay aside such bad behaviour. From the relation in which they stand to natural punishment, it can be inferred how positive punishments subserve this end as chastisements. The natural punishment of sin, which necessarily accompanies it, and which therefore is only permitted by the love of God, is separation from God as the highest good, is spiritual death or hell. God does not need to make hell; he finds it already made as the consequence of sin. As long then as man continues in sin, and out of fellowship with the highest good, God Himself cannot make him happy. In order to this, or that the sinner may be delivered from natural punishment, God in proof of His active love threatens Him with those positive punishments, whereby one is weaned from earthly things and led to long after eternal blessings; and these punishments extend even to the other life.

Christ’s passion, accordingly, has not the intention of doing away with a wrath of God on account of sin which he has not, for He is love, and love and wrath are mutually exclusive, and God is quite ready to forgive the past which cannot be undone. Neither has it any reasonable meaning to say that Christ removed from us the punishments of sin. For its natural punishments cannot be separated from sin. That Christ should take them upon Himself were therefore conceivable only were He also to take our sins upon Himself, in other words, were He to do wickedly; but this is absurd. The positive chastisements of sin, on the other hand, as the sole means of amendment, ought not to be removed from us, and Christ by His example rather taught us how to bear them with patience. Christ gave satisfaction to the love of God, having in His passion lent Himself as instrument to the Divine purpose of healing us from our sins; that is to say, He bore our sins in His passion, He successfully withstood the temptation with which the devil, sin, and the world, assailed Him; as Captain of our salvation, accordingly, He opened up the way of salvation, presenting to us the model how we should overcome the temptation of indwelling sin; and for this purpose He communicates to all who obey Him His life-giving Spirit. So that we are not acceptable to God through His imputed righteousness unless we be, at the same time, freed from the dominion of sin. For as the purpose of Christ’s mediatorial office is sanctification and renewal, that end is mainly achieved in the appropriation of Christ’s example in the destruction of the old Adam in each man. Christ’s atoning sacrifice, on the other hand, avails us nothing unless we fully master the sin that dwells in us.

While this change of the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice, as if it were only a model of the conquest over sin in man, approximates to the views of Schwenkfeld, the novelty consists in the conception of Divine punishments which is interwoven with it. Up to this time the threat of eternal condemnation, of hell, which was held out against sin, had been regarded as the positive punishment that God in His good pleasure had appointed; and anything else that might possibly be regarded as punishment thereof was not taken into account—not in theological theory at least. Now, Dippel assigns quite an opposite place to these two, but does so at the expense of accurate thinking. It betokens a complete breaking-up of the order of the universe, if God finds ready-made, and acquiesces in, the condemnation of sin, if the so-called natural punishment accordingly is to be regarded as a naturally necessary result, and not as at the same time a positive Divine punishment. It is thus an obvious ambiguity in language to call this condemnation by the name of punishment while denying its retributionary character. In both these respects the dilettantism and superficiality of Dippel betray themselves. At the same time, while regarding hell as in a certain sense a naturally necessary visitation impending over sin, he was in circumstances to regard the otherwise discernible penalties of sin at once as positive, and as means of reformation. In this respect he had obviously taken his cue from the Natural Law of his age; although his conclusion that all God’s chastisements aim at reformation was not what Grotius thought. This discussion by Dippel of the two classes of punishment has the following bearing upon his rejection of the doctrine of reconciliation. As is done by that doctrine, it was his intention also to show how we are freed from the punishment of condemnation. But for this it is not Christ’s merit but the amendment of individuals that avails according to him; and so far as positive punishments also subserve this end, to them also is attributed the effect of delivering the sinner from the natural punishment of his sin.

Dippel’s lucubrations bear the stamp of individualism in every respect, in their tone as in their terminology, in their up-breaking of the orderly conception of the universe held in unity by the idea of God, as well as in the complete isolation of the ethical progress of the individual subject. But hereby he put himself to a manifest disadvantage as against Leibnitz and his school. These regarded the thought of the civitas Dei, of the kingdom or city of God as the absolute ultimate end of moral order amongst mankind. From this consideration Leibnitz had defended the retributive justice of God precisely with reference to the conceivability of eternal punishment from which Dippel drew back. Finally, it was from Leibnitz’s idea that Canz received the impulse to set forth the whole of dogmatic theology under the form of Natural Law.¹³ In this respect his opponent had the advantage of Dippel, as he deduced from the idea of the absolute theocracy, that not merely are there natural punishments for sin but also judicial punishments. The former convince man of the individual hurtfulness of sin for himself, the latter convince him of the unreasonableness of his behaviour towards the common good of the kingdom of God, in having despised the supreme power and worked the disadvantage of many thousands. But the judicial punishments have not merely this subjective reference; they have, at the same time, the objective meaning of sublating that free consent to sin by which sin as such is constituted; and which, once committed, continues to lie as a blot on the commonwealth. Only herein is the idea of punishment completed; for the threat of calamity in order to check future consent is rather prevention than punishment. Canz moreover finds no difficulty in the thought that Christ endured punishment of this sort in place of men; he does not even take any notice of the objection raised by Dippel against it. Limiting himself merely to the purpose of defending his own opposite standpoint in fixing the idea of punishment, he did not carry his refutation so far as to point out the region in which Dippel’s assertions might find something to justify them. The immature form of that refutation makes it all the plainer that the arguments against the dogma, which were now for the first time emerging, were at the very outset rebutted by means of a view, the authority of which was not merely traditional, but had received a special impulse at the hand of Leibnitz.

51. The rationalizing systematization of Leibnitz’s philosophy by Wolf is, on the other hand, unfaithful to what were the most characteristic principles of that philosopher. Wolf abandons the idea of monads, anew regarding the relation between soul and body under a dualistic scheme. On this account also, he exchanges that conception of the universe, which is founded upon the inner conformity to purpose of the individual and of the whole, for the theory of the outward conformity to purpose, or rather subserviency to purpose of all details in succession.¹⁴ This particularly applies to that region of ideas which has to be attended to in the present problem, to wit, the moral and the social.¹⁵ Wolf draws the rule of moral action from comparison of the successive states of the individual, which are changed by his free actions. Those actions which make more perfect both our inward and our outward state are good; what, on the other hand, makes both less perfect is bad. This twofold determination of the value of actions holds good even irrespective of the connexion of things in God. As, rather, the result which proves actions good or bad rests upon natural necessity, the value of the motives of actions, according to the result contemplated, is dependent on the nature of things; this then is the sufficient ground of the obligation to act well and not wickedly. Therefore the rule of action, the moral law of nature, issues in the formula: do what makes thee and thy condition or that of others more perfect; refrain from doing what makes it less perfect. Progress in perfection is the highest good that man can attain; the prospect which accompanies this progress is blessedness. Now, it is in the highest degree noteworthy that Wolf offers no proof that the task of individual perfection includes the furthering of the perfection of others. The reference of our free actions to the perfection of others is simply asserted in the formula of the law of nature; and in laying down duties towards others, as well as in deducing the idea of society, recurrence is made to that formula without any proof being alleged in support of its construction. The error of ethical principle that is implied in this becomes perfectly clear when the society in which men with united energies seek to further their best interests is resolved into the idea of a convention of individuals who come to an agreement with one another. Wolf refers to this definition not merely in order to explain the political commonwealth, but also in representing the family as the association of parents and children with a view to the upbringing of the latter.

This individualism in morals particularly displays itself in the fact that the duties of man towards himself,—in other words, the actions which, in accordance with the law of nature, are necessary in order to one’s own individual perfecting,—take the first place. This sphere is not transcended when duties toward God are laid down; for the natural knowledge and recognition of God, as of One who binds us to the observance of the law of nature, establishes these duties in the sense that the perfections of God are employed as motives of action. Wolf, indeed, in his Theologia naturalis (tom. i. sec. 975), widens the field of vision by his statement that man, by the dominion of God over the creation, is bound in his actions to aim at his own perfection and at that of other men, yea, even at that of the whole universe. But this idea remains without any rectifying influence upon ethics, for the resort of the Leibnitzian conception of the universe is taken away from it. Now, in view of this peculiarity of the moral principle in the Wolfian philosophy, we can understand that the deliberate recognition of a suprarational revelation in Christianity, which Wolf and a section of his scholars make, gave no pledge of its own endurance. The connexion of the dogmatic thoughts of Christianity counts upon a consciousness of fellowship in the Church which precedes the religious and moral training of the individual, and includes it.¹⁶ If, on the other hand, the individual subject in the consciousness of the law of nature is so sure of himself that the thought of God, properly speaking, adds nothing thereto, then immediately the superfluity of the authority of revelation is experimentally proved, and the attitude of indifference assumed towards it ultimately incites to doubt and denial of the value and possibility of truths of revelation that transcend the reason. I venture to leave undiscussed the course of this development of thought amongst the theologians of the Wolfian school. The denials of the doctrine of reconciliation, which immediately ensue, are based as characteristic inferences upon the principles,—that Christianity has only rational contents, that God brings men to blessedness even without special revelation, and that the nurture of the individual in virtue, and the exhibition thereof in righteous action is the chief thing even within Christianity.

Hereby within the German Lutheran Church place is given to the Socinian view that Christianity is essentially the moral school for the production of individual virtue and dutifulness. This view, indeed, has not succeeded in displacing the tradition of Church doctrine and of the Church’s requirements; it has rather sought to adapt itself to the continued demands of the Church system in spite of the obvious inconsistency; but the representatives of Church tradition are at a disadvantage when compared with the Neologians, because they themselves maintain only a dubious confidence in the goodness of their cause. On account of these circumstances, and also on account of the undeniably moral tendency which the leaders of the illumination-theology evince, the historian is at once prevented from concurring in the party verdict that the illumination-theology is nothing but apostasy from Christianity. Such a verdict, as it is maintained by the leaders of exaggerated ecclesiasticism in the nineteenth century, is only another instance of the general experience that, in the immediately subsequent stage of culture, men are wont to show no understanding of that which went before, either exaggerating the errors of the latter in order to get for their own light as advantageous a background as possible, or suppressing the peculiarity of those who went before them in order to recommend themselves the more by the brilliant halo thus gained. Thus Melanchthon blackened the scholastic theology, and the illumination-divines represented the Reformation as if its leading tendency were to carry out the free investigation of Scripture. Now that half a century separates us from the time when the so-called “awakening” to positive Christianity contemptuously turned its back upon that of the illumination, the conviction begins to gain ground that the illumination-period has a positive value for the history of evangelical Christianity. A classical authority on this matter surely is Tholuck, who discerns in rationalism not an episode merely, causally unconnected with what precedes or follows, but a piece of history, a phase of development which was in some respects morbid but in others normal and natural.¹⁷ In agreement with this is the detailed critique of Hundeshagen, that the principles and requirements of the illumination are in the main neither opposed nor yet alien to the gospel, but rather have their origin in it; and that the tendencies to humanism,—these indubitably Christian thoughts,—have come to hold a place outside of and opposed to the Church, because within the Church they were held down and suppressed, and not permitted to take their proper place.¹⁸

It cannot be denied that the stand-point of the illumination, the stand-point of individuality, guided by the reason, striving after relative virtue, and elevated above all conventional rules, is not fitted to nourish and promote religious fellowship as such. So far the theological character of this school is unchurchly, or less than churchly. But the illumination did not deliberately surrender that position of connexion with the Church in which it found itself; on the contrary, it maintained it. Standing upon that ground it sought for the first time to give full force to the peculiar value of the moral individual, in setting aside all conventional hindrances—a task for which very strong motives are offered in Christianity. The narrowness of apprehension of this task which characterized the school, indeed, had the effect of causing all the forms of church-fellowship which it found existent to be gradually set aside and invalidated. If, however, a charge is to be brought against the men of the illumination in this matter, the same charge must also be laid against the representatives of orthodoxy of the earlier period, in whose tradition the views of their successors found their root no less than in the Wolfian philosophy. The Lutheran orthodoxy of the seventeenth century is jointly responsible for the theological illumination that followed it. For it was orthodoxy that first suffered the force of the idea of the Church to be weakened; it was orthodoxy that connected the individual’s gracious development only slightly with the notion of the Church; finally, as matter of fact, it was orthodoxy that lowered the Church to the level of a theological school. The illuminati only carried out further the practical task of the individual’s development in such a way as to reject the conditions which orthodoxy laid down; but these conditions had already, by the existence of Pietism, been shown on the one hand, directly, to be inoperative, and on the other hand, indirectly, to be unavailable. Moreover, the illuminati, in exclusively regarding the claims of intellectual culture, thereby only carried forward that tendency by which orthodoxy had been carried on up to the eighteenth century. Finally, the circumstance that they were able only to break up the orthodox traditions, without substituting for them a system of analogous ideas, arises from the fact that the illumination-divines as a whole confined themselves to the very range of notions that orthodoxy embraces. This is seen with peculiar clearness in the rejection which they made of the doctrine of Christ’s penal satisfaction. I am well aware that I cannot hope by this criticism to convince all those who think themselves entitled to judge on these matters; still, this cannot prevent me from expressing my view, since, moreover, I very well know why there still continues to be diversity in the judgment formed of the illumination. The illumination-tendency partly continues to be still directly operative among the half-educated masses, and in part it has found new connexions in theological science; it is thus an immediate object of practical and theoretical controversy. If now it is always difficult to judge dispassionately of one’s opponent during the battle, such an attitude is least of all to be expected from those opponents of rationalism and naturalism who only defend that system of thought. The weaknesses of which made the rise of the illumination to be possible at all, and who therefore are at the very outset unfit to overcome.

52. The opposition of the theologians of the illumination against the doctrine of reconciliation runs its course in two stages of development; Töllner first denying the independent value of Christ’s active obedience as a satisfaction to God; and Eberhard, Steinbart, and Löffler proceeding to extend the assault to the validity of the suffering and death of Christ as vicarious penal satisfaction. Even Töllner, however,¹⁹ by no means confines himself to that range of view which Piscator took, when he would have Christ’s active obedience to be merely a presupposition and condition of the passive. He rather gives to his view of the latter a turn different from the usual orthodox tradition. In this regard he separates himself from a predecessor who, in the eighteenth century, had repeated Piscator’s view without overpassing the limits of orthodoxy.²⁰ Töllner’s book, moreover, distinguishes itself from the more comprehensive undertakings of his successors by a copiousness in the development of his proofs, which reminds us of the examples set by Wolf and his orthodox disciples; while subsequent divines betoken their advanced illumination also by the fact that they hardly ever experience any difficulties in confuting the traditionary views opposed to their own. However, we may venture to omit an analysis of the exegetical portion of Töllner’s work, all the more because hardly any other thesis of the orthodox system has been so satisfactorily proved from general rational considerations, as the assertion of the independent satisfactory value of Christ’s active obedience. In the didactic portion of his work, Töllner draws his refutation of that thesis, first, from consideration of the person of Christ; secondly, from consideration of the office of Christ; thirdly, from the idea of vicarious satisfaction. He then develops his positive belief regarding the purpose of Christ’s satisfaction in His passion.

On the first head, Töllner maintains with Piscator that the true humanity of Jesus gives rise to an obligation on His part to a positive fulfilment of the law, at the same time declaring that the independence of law, which attaches to the Divine nature, could be communicated to His human nature just as little as the other immanent attributes of God,—eternity, necessity, unchangeableness. For the union of the two natures in Christ signifies only the most manifold and extensive co-operation of the Divine nature with the human, in the production of common actions; but in these the man Jesus, who is identical with the Son of God, is still the subject of obedience, and as man is bound to it for his own part, so that it was not possible for Him to give obedience in the room of others. Töllner, moreover, decides upon the question whether Jesus may not by His obedience, even although it was due by Himself, have given satisfaction for others also, at the same time representing in that obedience the whole human race. It is remarkable that Töllner considers this case, which was asserted by the Reformed theologians, subsequent to Piscator, without noticing that it belongs to the doctrinal tradition of the Reformed Church, and without stating it in the technical forms of that Church (pp. 251-2). The way in which he decides upon this problem is very characteristic.²¹ That any one should bear a representative character in any affair is conceivable in either of two ways:—either in virtue of authorization by others, as a ruler represents the people, being authorized by the whole people to all transactions which concern the common good; or by the approval of him who accepts an action, or the manner of acting of an individual, as if it were one which had been done in the name of all. Of these possibilities now, according to Töllner, the first does not apply to the obedience of Christ; for He has not received from men any authorization to represent them in the actions that He performs in the discharge of His duty. But the other possibility remains a mere possibility, and cannot be asserted to be the actual state of the case, as long as God has not distinctly declared and revealed His acceptance of Christ’s obedience as substitutionary in the room of men. Scripture does not contain such a declaration. With what naïveté is the illumination-theory of the origin of moral society associated with the utmost strictness in maintaining the revelation-character of Scripture, in order to justify the genuinely Lutheran notion of the human individuality of Christ as strictly self-contained in relation to others! But from this is drawn the conclusion against the Lutheran argument for the vicarious value of Christ’s active obedience, because at the same time the idea of the two natures in Christ was altered from the indefiniteness of a connexion of substance into the definiteness of a dynamico-ethical connexion.

Under the second head, which has respect to the office of Christ, the independent satisfactory value of His active obedience had been partly based upon the fact that in Christ’s official work, not merely the negative forgiveness of sins, but also the positive declaration of sinners as righteous, must be secured; partly also upon the consideration, that the restoration of men to their former condition demands not merely that deserved punishment should be suffered, but also that the righteousness which had fallen short should be made up. Töllner rejects these assertions, and then from the characteristic features of Christ’s official character he develops several independent proofs, tending to show the impossibility of the orthodox thesis. Against the real distinction between forgiveness of sins and justification or beatification (p. 256), he appeals, in the first instance, to the original religious feeling of Luther; that where forgiveness of sins is there is life and blessedness. He appeals further to the logical rule, that the removal of an injury can only then be conceived as having actually taken place, when the production of the opposite perfection is thought of as having begun. He appeals finally to the right conception of God which must be presupposed, to the richness of God’s supreme goodness and love towards men, which of itself is pledge of the salvation of men, if only, by means of penal satisfaction, the obstacle which sin raises between man and the righteous Father be once taken away. Were the active obedience of Christ still necessary to move God to the bestowal of salvation, this would mean that God does not make men blessed although there is no further obstacle to His doing so; but this is inconsistent with the Fatherly disposition of God. The independent satisfactory value of the active obedience of Christ had been deduced from the presupposition that the law as the original standard of the relation between God and man, in order to the attainment of blessedness, had to be abolished by Christ to make room for grace (p. 258). Against this hypothesis of the orthodox system, which corresponded to the usual doctrine of a covenant of works that was binding upon Adam, Töllner could affirm that there is no authority in Scripture for the setting up of a covenant of works, that if the active obedience of Christ as a fulfilment of the covenant of works in the place of men is the ground of their blessedness, then it is not grace but the law that still holds good as the ultimate standard of blessedness; and, finally, that on such an assumption blessedness is no gift, but a grant made by the justice of God to the men who are represented by Christ. This consequence, which is recognised with approval by Reformed theologians (p. 278), appears to be prejudicial to the leading and fundamental view of grace. Töllner, for his part, finds that in the idea of the Mediator and High Priest there is expressed no representation of men towards God, but only a mediation whereby the Divine grace is expressed to the people, that the intercession which is implied in Christ’s office excludes the legal validity of His substitutionary obedience towards God. And finally he declares with Piscator, that the continued obligation of believers to yield positive obedience to God leaves no room for the substitutionary value of Christ’s obedience. And this argument is cogent in Töllner’s hand, because he for good reasons denies the primary validity of the law as a means whereby blessedness might be gained by man. Into this series of denials there enters yet the following argument—a characteristic one for Töllner,—which is connected with a certain inaccuracy in the technical mode of expression. In reference to the question regarding the necessity of good works, the Lutheran doctrine had identified blessedness and justification; of this Töllner makes use here also where it is the necessity of Christ’s fulfilment of the law in order to our justification that is criticised. Now, in opposition to the formula concordiæ, it stands firm and unquestioned that only our own obedience has to do with blessedness; thus it is at once rendered impossible that the vicarious obedience of Christ should contribute to that end. But his moral vision is still further at variance with the principles of orthodox tradition, when he denies that God in any way, whether in the person of Christ or in the persons of all men, demands a perfect obedience in order to the blessedness of men. A perfect obedience without any transgressions is not possible to a finite creature, and cannot therefore reasonably be demanded by God. God thus demands only sincere obedience according to the ability of the individual; only in this relative respect must the obedience be as perfect as possible,—there is no absolute standard of moral perfection. Accordingly, even in the question as to Christ’s vicarious obedience, the only point would be, whether Christ had offered for fallen men that obedience which, allowing for the bestowal of grace upon individuals, would have been possible to them. In that case, however, it would follow that he would have done more for the obdurate than for the regenerate; but this were absurd. It is quite clear that the opposition of these moral principles (founded in the Wolfian school) against orthodoxy, has far wider effects than are shown merely in the solution of the problem immediately before us. Therefore it will not be possible fully to estimate the significance of these disclosures until later.

In his third argument, drawn from the idea of satisfaction considered in itself, Töllner cannot avoid repeating much of what had already been said in speaking of Christ’s office. The main point in it is, that the active obedience of Christ as a vicarious prestation does not correspond to the idea of satisfaction; because the law enjoins upon each individual compliance with its demands in his own actions. The argument of La Placette, on the other hand, which Töllner appropriates, is sophistical. The assumption of Christ’s active obedience in the well-known sense would make the necessity of his passion to be superfluous. For that obedience would represent men as individuals who had done all that was good, and committed nothing that was wrong; but if this was the case, they were not liable to punishment, and therefore no vicarious endurance of punishment was necessary for them. According to Töllner’s own distinction regarding the reference of Christ’s obedience in its two aspects to meet the obligations of men as men, and of men as sinners, men as such were not liable to punishment, but as sinners they stood in need of vicarious penal satisfaction. Thus, this third group of arguments contains only what either is not new or not to the point; but an episode in this connexion betokens the tendency with which Töllner in the last part of his work interprets the ground and final cause of the satisfaction which he still recognises to have been made in the passion of Christ. If the vicarious significance of His active obedience be refuted by the allegation that the law demands to be fulfilled by each one on his own account, the endurance of merited punishment seems analogously to be exacted of each one, and satisfaction by any other person seems in this respect to be inadmissible. This inference Töllner wards off only by means of the authority of Scripture. But this he cannot do without in the strangest way abandoning the accepted interpretation of the thought. He keeps to the traditionary paths so far as to recognise in Christ’s passion the equivalent of the punishments merited by men; and, appealing to the Divine omnipotence, he is willing to rest satisfied that Christ in a short time suffered as much as all men were bound to suffer. But the thought that this penal suffering was a satisfaction rendered to the justice of God is rejected. For, in his final discussion, Töllner expressly declares against this basis of the orthodox theory, partly because it is not clearly laid down in Scripture, and partly because it is rather the love of God that is indicated as the motive of Christ’s surrender to death. Following out this thought, Töllner pronounces against the stress laid by orthodox theology upon the Divine justice in the problem of Christ’s passion, because by the introduction of that element the bestowal of grace, which God decreed and promised, would cease to be a real and true bestowal of grace; because, moreover, all right and power of showing grace is thus denied to God. Because, finally, the complete satisfaction of His justice, as it is asserted to have been given by Christ as the representative of men, would be an impossible condition of the bestowal of grace. Instead of accepting the forensic idea of righteousness handed down by orthodox tradition, Töllner avows his preference for the idea propounded by Leibnitz that it is goodness tempered by wisdom. From this point of view, he finds satisfaction of God’s righteousness to be accomplished in the institution of a representative of men, an institution which partly maintains the motives to obedience which arise from the punishment of disobedience, that is to say, in penal example; partly, by instituting an exemplary obedience, makes men worthy and capable of receiving grace, and thus provides for their sanctification. More closely considered, however, the satisfaction given in Christ’s passion is not so much an immediate condition of God’s bestowal of grace upon men, as it is a means for that sanctification of men upon which the bestowal of grace immediately depends. For that Christ has borne the penalties of sin which we have merited does not free us from the natural punishments which are inseparable from actual sin; this last, therefore, must first be removed in sanctification, before the full bestowal of grace is complete. Sanctification, on the other hand, can again arise only out of the restoration of our confidence in God, which is hindered by the apprehension of the punishments due for sin; Christ’s endurance of suffering accordingly is not merely a penal example, but also the guarantee that punishments no longer impend on account of our sins.

Töllner’s treatise demands this full analysis even if, with Baur,²² we come merely to the conclusion that its substance is not essentially distinct from the doctrines of the Socinians and Arminians. For in this, as in his other works, Töllner is distinguished by a methodical mode of presentation, which ought not to be ignored in giving an account of what he teaches. But when looked at more closely, his doctrine stands related to his cognate predecessors that have been mentioned, in the following way. It is a Socinian but not an Arminian feature to make the bestowal of grace dependent on sanctification. It is Arminian, but not Socinian, on the other hand, at one time to recognise a penal example in the death of Christ, at another time to make the remission of the punishments merited by believers dependent upon that death. But at the same time, this representation, as it is made by Töllner, is otherwise conditioned than it is in Limborch (p. 316). For the latter concedes to Christ’s passion, although indefinitely, a reconciling effect upon God; Töllner completely denies any such effect, and recognises in the bearing and taking away of our punishments by Christ only a reference to men, the purpose namely of awakening in them the trust in God that is necessary to holiness. From this prevailing point of view we can easily understand that Töllner, in his last treatise bearing the title, Alle Erklärungsarten vom versöhnenden Tode Christi laufen auf Eins heraus,²³ could again approach more closely to Socinianism. In that treatise he seeks to show that all theories upon the subject have practically the same effect; inasmuch as all trace in the death of Christ a ground of assurance of the bestowal of grace upon us, and a confirmation of the Divine promises that have been made with respect to that bestowal. Töllner thus sees in this statement of Socinus (p. 298) the neutral point of all theories; but this would not have occurred to him, if his reference of Christ’s death merely to believers and not to God had not exhibited characteristic analogy to the view of Faustus.

At the same time, it ought not to be regarded as unimportant that this Illumination divine makes a peculiar advance beyond his predecessors in those parties in the idea of God, although this is not so conspicuous as it might be because the conclusions are the same as those drawn by them. For while the Socinians and Arminians deny the existence in God of the attribute of penal justice forensically viewed, they recognise the specifically mediæval idea of God’s arbitrary dominion subject to no limitation as the deepest expression of His being, which they limit only by the consideration of His reasonableness towards men. The Socinians explain this attitude of God towards men as the natural result of the arbitrary bestowal of certain rights upon men; the Arminians, in a less harsh form, regard it as what is most appropriate to the dignity of God, and the position of the men whom He has created.²⁴ Töllner goes beyond this view, opposing as he does the full Christian thought of God’s supreme goodness and philanthropy (as above, p. 480), to the juristic conception of the penal justice that is necessary to Him. In this he adheres to the original point of view of the Reformers, from which they had immediately apprehended the thought of the reconciliation of men, a point of view which in the orthodox theology of both confessions had been rendered inoperative, partly by recurrence to the Areopagite’s idea of God, and partly by pushing into prominence His habitual justice before His actual grace. It will perhaps be said that Töllner does not regard this idea of God as the positively Christian one, but has given currency to it as being the natural and obvious one accessible to the mere reason.²⁵ But in spite of this Töllner at the same time expressly says that the sinner in his anxiety about merited punishment is destitute of confidence towards God.²⁶ As, then, the sinner, or natural man, does not recognise God as love, the transference of our punishment to Christ is the means appointed by God whereby He specifically proves His love towards sinners (as above, p. 627), and awakens in them that confidence towards Himself which renders possible the sanctification with a view to which all is designed.²⁷ Being able to cite in support of this doctrine expressions of Paul and of John, expressions of an unambiguous clearness such as were not available for the opposite view, Töllner has resuscitated Abelard’s leading thought (p. 35). Of course this will not tell greatly in his favour in the opinion of those who adopt Anselm’s mode of viewing the question, and from the outset charge Abelard with rationalism. But one partial view has no right to place itself above the other. I have already had occasion to charge the orthodox development of doctrine with having exhibited in a one-sided manner the God-man in His doing and suffering as man’s representative over against God’s justice without at the same time considering the God-man in His doing and suffering as representing God’s love and grace towards sinners (p. 259). In the New Testament there are utterances which point so distinctly to the last-mentioned thought, that Töllner was entitled and bound to lay stress upon this side of the question, even although he for his part came short of the full extent of his problem, misapprehending as he did the biblical view which represents Christ as men’s representative in His doing and suffering (as above, p. 526). If Töllner then deserves credit for having resuscitated the view of Abelard, which justly met with acceptance in the middle ages along with the other, but had died out in evangelical theology, his difference in point of originality from the great French schoolman ought not to be left unnoticed. Abelard, in conjunction with the already mentioned thought of the proof of God’s love conveyed in Christ’s passion, has given expression to a view of Christ’s intercession, in which the independence of Christ’s active obedience as representing us before God, is for the first time hinted at (pp. 37, 38),—a thought which reaches much further than Anselm’s doctrine. But Töllner one-sidedly maintains the first thought with a view to refuting the last.

53. When measured with this predecessor, Töllner therefore produces the impression that he destroyed more than he built up, especially as his leading positive thought has not received any systematic development. In particular, one is led to ask whether the actual penal value of Christ’s passion can be conceived, unless Christ be recognised as men’s representative with God, when the necessity of punishment is made to rest on the perfections of God. Sometimes, however, the importance of a theologian does not depend upon the completeness with which his doctrine has been carried out, so much as upon the occasion he has given for starting new problems. When I take upon me to compare Töllner with Abelard in this respect, I refer to the hints given by him respecting the relation between guilt and punishment. These rise beyond the traditional field of vision, and open up the prospect of a new view of the problem of reconciliation; even although that did not disclose itself to Töllner himself. All the elucidations which had been put forth subsequent to the Reformation, with regard to the conditions upon which forgiveness of sins is obtained, orthodox as well as heterodox, had been at one in their definition of that idea, that it is equivalent to remission of punishment. The guilt whereby sin, actual or original, had distorted the relation of men to God was regarded as permanent in the impending threat of eternal death; remission, or the assurance that this punishment will not be carried out, was regarded as the taking away of guilt; and the only dispute was upon the question whether that result be conditioned by Christ’s vicarious penal satisfaction, or by the arbitrary grace of God, and the believing obedience of men. A departure from that identification of the two notions emerged in the case of Walaeus and Quenstedt (p. 258), who discerned in Christ’s passive obedience provision against punishment, and in the active obedience provision against guilt; but this distinction of necessity continued to be unintelligible, not only because no means were used to explain it, but also because it stands connected with the other assumption, that release from liability to punishment, and release from the binding power of the law, render necessary the two co-ordinate sorts of Christ’s obedience. Now, that distinction between reatus culpæ and reatus pœnæ recurs in Töllner, in the introduction to his treatise on the active obedience of Christ (p. 26 sq.), and in the following shape: From the reatus of divine punishments, which has its ground in the moral perfections of God, must be distinguished the reatus of sin in itself, which consists in the fact that a possible perfection remains unrealized in the world, that the joy that God has in the world is diminished, His honour injured, and the respect due to His law set at naught. In the previous question, whether Christ has taken away the one reatus as well as the other, he expresses himself upon the possible means of taking away the guilt of sin, to the effect that the imperfection of the world caused by sin must be made good by a perfection equally great, which otherwise would not have appeared in the world. Compared with this, he regards it as a work of much less value that men’s liability to punishment should be done away with by the suffering of a representative. He even finds it to be conceivable that compensation of guilt by the virtue of the representative might make the discharge from liability to punishment through a representative to be superfluous. According to these premisses, one expects to find a vindication of Christ’s active obedience in the direction of the hints of Quenstedt and Walaeus, much more than an assault upon its validity. But the expectation is not realized. Töllner after all, at the close of the section in which he argues from the meaning of Christ’s official character against the independent value of His active obedience, brings forward that distinction again in the form of an objection (as above, p. 554). If Christ’s passive obedience is compensation for man’s liability to punishment, it seems to follow therefrom that the justified person is not yet for that reason at once freed from guilt, that he does not receive innocence, that he does not cease to be a debtor in the sight of God. But in this connexion he no longer thinks of the compensation for guilt by means of virtue, which he had asserted at an earlier stage; he maintains, on the contrary, that things must be exactly so in justification, if it is to be really a bestowal of grace. For the latter, as such, abolishes the state of guilt, while any compensation would change the bestowal of grace into an absolution that were legally due. Finally, in a later place (p. 589), he seems to express himself differently. While reatus pœnæ includes in itself an actual obligation to suffer, reatus culpæ, he seems to say, expresses merely a certain relation of the sinner to God. From this would follow the obligation to make good the injuries done to God by opposite actions, if this were possible. “But thus the guilt which attaches to sinful man continues as a melancholy relation, which has as its consequence the liability to punishment. But still it continues to be merely a relation”! By this Töllner merely means to deny a double liability on the part of sinful men, which would lay the foundation for the twofold form of Christ’s obedience. He thus refers merely to the continuance of the relation of guilt, under the already explained condition that it will be done away with by God’s act of bestowal of grace.

Here for the first time is guilt, considered in itself, clearly distinguished from liability to punishment, and a possibility of freeing the problem of the atonement from the fetters laid upon it by the juridical mode of treatment established. The latter mode of treatment has for its characteristic feature that the endurance of punishment eo ipso is the abolition of guilt. When one who has been found guilty by a judge on account of some criminal offence has undergone his punishment, there can no longer be any talk of guilt on his part, from a legal point of view; but the moral judgment demands quite other proofs of the cleansing of a criminal from his guilt than is supplied by the fact of his having duly undergone the punishment determined by the law. Töllner accordingly sets on foot the moral view of the problem when he maintains that there must be another method for removing the guilt of men, to come into operation in conjunction with punishment, whether in person or in a substitute. I shall not now discuss whether it be sufficient that the moral guilt of sin that is not cancelled by the penal satisfaction of Christ should be taken away by the simple act of God’s grace. But as the reatus pœnæ is characterized as an actual obligation, while the reatus culpæ, on the other hand, is regarded merely as a relation, we are reminded of the antithesis between justification as a real change and the mere forgiveness of sins, which Duns Scotus regards as not identical because guilt and liability to punishment are only relatio relationis (p. 85). If the problem of reconciliation through Christ is connected with such relations, a fruitful application of them to the solution of that problem could not of course be expected as long as no recourse was had to criticism of the religious and moral consciousness. Of this also we can very clearly satisfy ourselves by reference to Töllner. While distinguishing guilt and liability to punishment, he still did not know in what relation the two ought to be placed to each other. Accordingly his inquiry into “Divine punishments and the Divine penal justice”²⁸ leads him into entire uncertainty. For Töllner judges of God’s dominion over His creatures after the analogy of a father’s power, and not after the example of a ruler; the purpose of God’s punishments therefore is also regulated hereby. A father’s punishment has the object of improving the subject; that of a ruler is designed to prevent the continued commission of actions that are prejudicial, or omission of actions that are beneficial to the common weal and its other members.²⁹ Or, in the language of Wolf, the purpose of punishment on the part of the State is to deter, while paternal punishment is discipline.³⁰ Proceeding upon this assumption, Töllner raises the question whether God punishes sin, not merely in a natural but also in an arbitrary way? He draws a provisional answer from the certainty of the forgiveness of sins, for the forgiveness of sins must consist in the remission of positive punishments, because natural punishments, as experience shows, are not remitted, and cannot be remitted without a miracle. From the purpose of the amelioration of the subject which is the motive of God’s punishments, he infers that those evils are punishments in which it is obvious to the sinner, and to others also, that these evils happen to him on account of his sins, and in which it is obvious also for what sins they have been sent. But this occurs only in cases either when they present themselves as natural consequences of bad actions, as, for example, physical evils follow upon the misuse of the bodily organs; or when a direct declaration of God accompanies the evil, or has preceded it as a general threat. Evils in fact assume the character of punishments if they are inflicted in accordance with a decree of God, if they are sufficiently felt, if they are fitted to call forth due repentance; finally, if they are proportioned to the crime. But now, natural punishments do not suffice to keep men back from wicked actions. In consequence of this, God makes use of positive punishments also, in order to the reformation of the sinner. The same consequence flows from the fact that several of the necessary marks of punishment are not wont to show themselves in the class of natural punishments. The Divine decree is not very obvious when they occur, for they would ensue as immediate consequences of certain crimes even if there were no God; “and in fact several truths of natural theology are needed that they may be recognised as Divine penalties.” God’s punishments, moreover, must be felt, but the greater number of natural punishments are not felt at all, particularly the deeper a man has sunk in wickedness. Finally, in natural punishments, for the most part, there is no proportion to the intention, which makes an action to be sin, for they proceed merely according to the action, even although it may have been unintentional. As, accordingly, a series of inferences is always necessary to recognise natural punishments as being Divine, it is probable therefore that God imposes positive punishments also, in which everything that pertains to the special nature and purpose of a punishment will be more perfectly discernible. But then Töllner goes on to convince himself that even positive punishments cannot be clearly recognised as such, either by the persons who are visited by them or by others, where there is no Divine indication of their connexion, and where their proportion is not clear. While drawing from this the conclusion that they all the more certainly pertain to the future life, he at the same time frankly admits that he has laid himself open to the reproach of having darkened this doctrine instead of clearing it up.

In this the honest man is certainly quite right. But wherein is it that he has gone wrong in this investigation? In having undertaken to give a decision upon the subsumption of evil under the idea of Divine punishment in an entirely objective dogmatic way; that is, in such a way that the reality of that idea may be brought to more than probable conviction in the subject of punishment himself and also in others. The theme itself certainly betrays the interest taken by the Illumination in the moral conditions of individual life, an interest that orthodoxy had never meddled with. Orthodoxy limited itself to the doctrine that all mankind, from the natural reaction of God’s justice against Adam’s sin, is liable to the highest conceivable punishments, and hereby the analogous evils of this mortal life were, on the one hand, so much exceeded, and, on the other hand, so fully explained, that it seemed needless to pay any special attention to them. As this dogmatic settlement of the matter was brought into doubt by Leibnitz, and the denial of it, particularly in the assertion of the salvation of the heathen, became common to all the theologians of the Illumination, Töllner’s proceeding shows that nevertheless men did not understand how to propound and to investigate the question of the punishment of individuals otherwise than dogmatically. The material opposition between the Illumination and orthodoxy on this point presupposes an identity of method. But by this method no positive results were gained, only the doubtfulness of merely relative conclusions. It is quite of a piece with this that Töllner knows no absolute standard of morality (p. 350), and that he finds no rule to determine whether and when Divine punishments take place. For definite knowledge regarding the Divine punishments is one form in which the validity of the absolute law of moral action is recognised. If this connexion of ideas was obscured by the dogmatic method of the illumination theology, an altogether new standpoint from which to regard the matter was needed in order to find an escape from this confusion.

One might almost be tempted to believe that the very next author who falls to be considered here had taken up this subjective critical point of view for the treatment of the idea of punishment. J. A. Eberhard³¹ recognises as the chief element in God’s punishments the purpose of reformation, and though he makes the concession of occasionally taking into account also the purpose of the punishments inflicted by the state, which is to deter, he still insists, against Grotius, that there must always be added even then the reflex influence upon the subject of punishment—his improvement. He asserts moreover that if this purpose be attained, the feeling of punishment must give place to the most blessed results of improvement, otherwise the requisite proportion between punishment and crime would not be maintained. The ground on which he proceeds is the assumption of the supreme wisdom and goodness of God, which does not allow of His being compared to a ruler (i. p. 114 sq.; ii. p. 259 sq.), and which, as regards the case immediately under discussion, rests precisely upon those scriptural expressions in which punishment is represented as a fatherly benefaction on the part of God (Job v. 17; Prov. iii. 11, 12; Heb. xii. 5, 6). The proof is derived from the rule that the sinner, who has come to have better thoughts, will no longer discern any punishment in the continuing evil; that he no longer feels unhappy in it, however painful it may be to his sentient nature. Eberhard adds an application to the assumption of eternal punishments, to the effect that the representation usually made ought to be reversed (i. p. 422). If eternal punishment is designed, irrespective of the subject of punishment, to maintain the prosperity of the whole rational universe, Eberhard claims that the subject of it must needs know the good which his sufferings are producing, and that he should console himself with the reflection that God is just to himself also. On this condition, however, eternal punishments become means of reformation; that is, they are denied in their proper meaning. These observations are accompanied by the general statement that evils, which are materially alike, are punishments or not, according to the constitution of the subject who is visited by them (i. pp. 119, 408). Whether an evil be a punishment or no is thus determined by a subjective judgment on the part of him who suffers. Still, in this theory of Eberhard’s, the subjective critical definition of the idea of punishment is by no means gained. He is far from considering the subjective consciousness of guilt to be the ground of our knowledge of punishment according to the law’s absolute standard of estimation; for he keeps in view exclusively the analogous fact that the reformed sufferer, having so far as his consciousness is concerned expiated his guilt, no longer feels and considers the abiding evil to be punishment. This observation has not led him to the fundamental truth that corresponds to it, that it is exactly the subjective consciousness of guilt that proves an evil to be punishment. And, if we imagine that this assumption passes as a matter of course along with the other, we are mistaken so far as Eberhard is concerned. For he knows nothing at all of the fact of the consciousness of guilt, expecting as he does that the sinner by his own feeling of proportionate physical evil will be brought to the knowledge of moral evil (i. p. 124).

As the observation of these facts of the moral self-consciousness is thus incomplete, neither is the fact quite accurately expressed that the reformed sinner regards the evils which overtake him as consequences of his sins, no longer as punishments but as Divine benefactions. In the first place, the Bible texts, to which Eberhard appeals to show that punishments coming from God have the value of paternal chastisements and proofs of love, teach no truth that is obvious in itself, teach no truth of natural religion, but convey a conviction which has been hardly won in the region of positive moral religion, in the struggle of the consciousness of guilt with the absolute obligation of God’s law, and in the struggle of the consciousness of election with the hampering and adverse dispensations of God’s providence. Moreover, in the contemplation of Divine chastisement the purpose of benevolence is indeed recognised; but, on the other hand, the sense of retribution as an evil is by no means taken away. Eberhard’s interpretation of the Divine punishments as means of amelioration, and as absolute acts of benevolence, cannot be recognised as a scientific piece of knowledge that universally holds good; much less his inference from it that a remission of punishment, because Christ had taken it upon Himself, would be to deprive us of what are real benefits, and thus would be absurd on the part of God. The preceding criticism meets with further justification if we compare the view of G. S. Steinbart,³² which is in harmony with Eberhard in essentials, although differing from him in details. He, too, knows only of the end of reformation as aimed at in God’s punishments. But the distinction between natural and arbitrary punishments receives from him a clearer shape than it does from his predecessors, who also make use of it. Töllner had not been able to establish in fact the distinction which he had made; and Eberhard (ii. p. 268) had indeed adopted it but failed to apply it. Steinbart, for the first time, investigates the subject with greater strictness. In order to fix the idea of punishment, he distinguishes the physical from the moral consequences of an action. The former, which have no relation to the moral law, and only proceed in accordance with natural law, which accordingly alike overtake those who have performed the same action, whether they did it as moral or as immoral, have not the distinctive feature which could prove them to be punishments; they remain therefore completely untouched by the question whether punishments could be taken to himself by another person than the offender. The idea of punishment applies only to the moral consequences of an action. In this sphere, the natural punishments consist in the disgust with ourselves that arises without regard to the Lawgiver, from seeing that we ourselves have injured our own position; and this feeling is always strictly proportioned to the morality of the action. This punishment, however, is something beneficent, as an incentive to daily repentance, and therefore necessary even for the reformed man. Therefore this punishment also Christ ought not to take away from men. In thinking of the Lawgiver, there follows upon crime, as a natural punishment, the very unpleasant consciousness of having injured him. If now, as the Jews do, we represent Him to ourselves as a tyrant, then, along with slavish fear, hatred to him will be produced; but if, as Christians, we think of the Lawgiver as a bountiful Father, then we shall feel ashamed indeed in our inmost souls before Him, but all the stronger shall we feel the desire by renewed zeal to be well-pleasing to Him. Arbitrary punishments are evils which the Lawgiver connects with disobedience to his commands. But, as regards God, arbitrariness in this procedure is limited by His goodness, and by the proportion that is observed between punishment and the purpose of reformation, in such a way that they are made to cease when reformation results. In particular, God’s goodness excludes the assumption that in order to the remission of such punishments he requires to be propitiated by satisfaction. Rather the proof of love which God has given in sending and sacrificing His Son, frees from all apprehension of such arbitrary punishments. Thus he who accepts in faith that proof of love has nothing further to fear except the natural consequences of his follies.

The aimlessness of this criticism of God’s punishments is at once evident when we compare it with Dippel’s view of the same subject; and we do not at all need, by anticipation, to proceed to the manner of viewing the subject that is possible and imperative for us, in order to recognise the unsatisfactoriness of the illumination standpoint. The points of contact between Steinbart and Dippel are,—first, the strict, matter-of-fact distinction between natural and arbitrary punishment; second, the deducing of the latter from God’s love, seeking the reformation of the sinner; third, the exemption of natural punishment from direct positive institution by God. But they follow interests that are completely opposed, and therefore come to opposite results, for they assign to what is implied in the natural punishments a different importance for the sinner. The natural punishment of sin which, as such, can be transferred to no other, means, with Dippel, separation from God as the highest Good; with Steinbart, the disgust of the sinner with himself, and shame in presence of the Lawgiver, who at the same time is the bountiful Father. Dippel, therefore, seeks to ascertain the way in which positive punishments, by the amelioration they produce, help to secure release from natural punishment. Steinbart, on the other hand, requires the continuance of the natural punishments which he recognises, in order to bring about reformation and thereby ward off the positive punishments of sin. The cause of this great divergence is, that Dippel is aware of the whole weight of guilt in sin which never at all occurs to the Illumination theologians. It must be admitted that he did not apprehend that thought in the form that properly belongs to it; he expresses it only according to its objective relation, not as a subjective function. But, when compared with this predecessor, the moral sphere of vision of the theologians of the Illumination appears in all its littleness. Still, if they could not even by him be instructed respecting the subjective function of guilt, truly orthodox tradition had not taught them anything regarding this peculiar phenomenon. Rather is the defectiveness of the theology of the Illumination on this point only the consequence of the fact that orthodoxy in this respect had not gained or produced any adequate knowledge. Orthodox theology knew guilt only as what objectively establishes sin as such,³³ and, as regards original sin, as impersonal liability to punishment; and found therefore no difficulty in the assertion that the doing away with the liability to punishment that Christ’s satisfaction effects eo ipso abolishes guilt. Can any well-founded complaint be raised against the Illumination theologians from this quarter, because they did not recognise subjective guilt in its full significance,³⁴ and therefore thought so lightly of punishment as to deny the necessity of Christ’s penal satisfaction? The insolvency which the Illumination discloses at this point is rather the direct consequence of the long-continued deficit which orthodoxy had accumulated in apprehending of the moral conditions of the Christian religion.

54. Eberhard and Steinbart contented themselves with deducing from the reformatory purpose of Divine punishment, which they had asserted, and from their assumption of God’s unconditioned goodness to men, the simple conclusion that no remission of punishment at all, and especially no bearing of it by Christ must be thought of, if we are not to attribute to God an absurd course of procedure. The similar dissertation by Löffler (as above, p. 291 sq.), is copious and many-sided; and I give it here only in a more appropriate order than that in which it originally appears: First, The thought of forgiveness as an expression of a change of disposition is in contradiction with God’s unchangeableness; and the forgiveness of guilt contradicts His truthfulness, which prevents Him from regarding a guilty person as innocent, or from regarding one who is guilty in particular respects as being innocent on the whole. Secondly, The thought of a satisfaction, as giving occasion to the forgiveness of sins, is again irreconcileable with God’s immutability, but also at the same time incapable of being carried out, both because each individual is bound himself to do the things that are required of him and also because it is impossible that these should be transferred to others. Thirdly, the thought of a penal satisfaction is contrary to the benevolent design of punishment generally, and also, particularly, it has no direct connexion with the purpose of amelioration, unless penal satisfaction be at the same time conceived of as a penal example; moreover it is not in accordance with the nature of moral actions. For in these a distinction must be drawn between matter and form, between their harmony or discordance with the law, and the freedom wherewith they are determined upon. As regards the external (juridical) legality of an action, which may even be produced by constraint, a substitute may certainly take the place of the person bound by the law in cases laid down by the Lawgiver; but not as regards the free decision which grounds the morality of the action. In like manner can an arbitrary punishment for a contravention of the law be remitted at the pleasure of the judge, or be borne by another. But punishment for the immorality of actions, which God accomplishes by means of the smiting of conscience, can neither be felt by another person, nor can it be removed by God Himself. Finally, the outward arbitrary punishments which God can cause to follow upon immorality of action either are not recognisable as such by the rules of logic, or do not admit of being taken away from the person who is visited by them, if they do not cease when they have accomplished their object in the reformation of the sinner.

This train of thought avoids all consideration of the idea of guilt, and herein betrays its weakness with reference to the problem contemplated; the specification, however, of those marks of actions, in accordance with which they are to be judged legally or morally, offers a point of view which in this generality of application had not up to that time been adopted with reference to the question of the possibility of a vicarious satisfaction. But with this criticism of the traditionary ideas the task of the Illumination theologians was not exhausted. It required to justify its negative result by the positive teaching of those scriptural lines of thought which up till then it had been usual to embrace in the idea of penal satisfaction which it repudiated. The treatment of the Bible representations by the three men who had abandoned the idea of satisfaction is not identical; these results, however, in a certain measure, supplement one another, as they are worthy of each other in the incompleteness and superficiality of their procedure. It must, however, be granted them that after their own fashion they have given weight to certain lines of thought taken by the apostles, which had wrongly been left unheeded by orthodox theology, and which to some extent offer insuperable obstacles to its establishment upon a scriptural foundation.

Eberhard could, with a certain measure of justice, maintain that the most conspicuous passages of the New Testament bring redemption directly into relation with men. He formulated this fact as meaning that the redemption of Jesus saves man in sanctifying Him, or that Christ’s death helps us mediately to receive grace (penitence and reformation being presupposed), or, with Töllner, that that proof of the love of God moves us to counter-love (ii. pp. 248, 276, 306). That the death of Christ should primarily mean a satisfaction to God had for the most part been pieced together from an analysis of those attributes which have a specifically Old Testament stamp. In order to put a stop to such a mode of procedure, Eberhard maintains, in the first place, the principle for which he had the support of Ernesti’s authority, that Jesus and His apostles, in their representations of Christ’s sacrifice and Priesthood, accommodated themselves to the understanding of their hearers. He then undertakes to derive from the separate biblical expressions some other sense than that which the orthodox obtained.³⁵ Redemption (ἀπολύτρωσις) in the usus loquendi of the LXX. signifies liberation in general without implying a ransom-price, reference to which cannot be traced; this predicate then denotes the death of Christ as the means of emancipating us from ignorance, superstition, sin. If, then, Jesus is called the ransom-price of many, this is merely a metaphorical expression for the high value of the trouble and the toil which He devoted to the object of healing the folly and vice of others. The sacrificial predicate of atonement (ἱλασμός) compares the death of Christ to the sacrifices of the Old Testament, which were merely civil actions to secure deliverance from temporal punishments, or certifications that one desired to be restored again to the rights of a citizen. Thus also to the death of Christ no substitutionary value is assignable; but He assures us of our gracious acceptance with God on condition of our renewed obedience. The accommodation in this line of thought is all the clearer, because prophets as well as apostles subordinate the outward offerings to the pious disposition. If, then, we can attain to acceptance with God by no other path than that of virtue, the salutary truth of Christianity is herein expressed, that Jesus leads, directs, supports us in this path. Steinbart also supposes an accommodation on the part of Paul to the Jewish sphere of thought, when he recognises at least for the Jews redemption by the death of Christ (as above, p. 136 seq.) He assumes slavish fear of God to be the general tone pervading that sphere of thought, a fear in which they held themselves bound to render compulsory service at His arbitrary command, and particularly, thought that all suspended punishments for their offences would be made up for in their being eternally delivered over to Satan. Jesus delivered the Jews from this fear, and led them to child-like confidence in God’s goodness, having proved by His death (or rather by His resurrection) that by death one does not fall under the power of Satan. But to the heathen, Christ did not need to announce any deliverance from punishment, God having overlooked the time of their ignorance; on them He has only bestowed more accurate instruction in order to improve their moral disposition. But Jews and heathen by Christ’s death have been reconciled with each other and with God, and are besought by Christ and His Ambassadors to be reconciled, that is, to lay aside all dreadful notions of arbitrary proceeding on God’s part, to have confidence towards Him, and willingly to follow His fatherly counsels. These views find their support in the epistles to the Galatians, Colossians, Ephesians, inasmuch as in them Paul differently determines the significance of Christ’s death for Jews and for heathen. These thoughts, unknown to the commonly received system of doctrine, have been worked up by Steinbart into a picture thus grotesque, because he, for his part, takes no notice of the universal reference of Christ’s death, which is no less clearly declared in the New Testament. This universal reference Löffler undertakes to explain away in a very revolutionary manner. Having propounded the question whether the thought of forgiveness which, without doubt, occurs in the New Testament, relates to the past sins of Jews and of heathen or to the future sins of Christians, he convinces himself, by a survey of all the books of the New Testament, that only the former is the case.³⁶ To Christians, who by Christ’s purging sacrifice are freed from the dominion of sin, that is, are led to the way of reformation, applies the far from extravagant exhortation to sin no more. Against this I can only observe that the dilemma is falsely put, and add to it that the expression, 1 John ii. 1, which directly contradicts Löffler’s assertion, cannot be set aside by the whimsical suggestion that the letter is directed to non-Christians.

The results arrived at by Eberhard and Steinbart recur in a dogmatic form in H. Ph. C. Henke.³⁷ According to him Christ fulfilled His task as Author of the improved and universal religion by His death also, having thereby vindicated and ratified His doctrine, given the example of finished virtue, attained in the surest way His end, which was not political, but universally ethical, and displayed the highest love towards men. By accommodation to the Jewish mode of representation, His death is represented as a propitiatory sacrifice, and rightly, in so far as in it is manifested the congruence of His obedience with the Divine command, His personal innocence, His full devotion to His task, and the ground on which the human conscience may be pacified with regard to sin. On the other hand, a vicarious significance can be conceded neither to the active nor to the passive obedience of Christ; for the effects of those prestations as they are asserted are absurd. For it is not conceivable that God at once resolves upon punishments and remits them, that, by exhibiting clemency instead of justice, He shows the inadequacy of laws; and it is impossible that evils should not follow upon sins. Forgiveness of sins, therefore, or release from punishment, as brought about by Christ, only means that it takes place in the case of those who through Christ’s instrumentality cease to sin, or that the strict punishments of the Mosaic law no longer impend over those who have been converted to Christ. Reconciliation with God, therefore, is only the expression of the subjective feeling of him who is taught of Christ. The Pauline thought of justification by faith, in particular, which is only thought of in opposition to the strictness of the Mosaic law, is the expression of that subjective peace of conscience which accompanies the acceptance of the doctrine of Christ, and the practical exercise of an amended life.³⁸

Closely related, if not quite in harmony, is the attitude taken by J. Sal. Semler³⁹ and J. F. Gruner.⁴⁰ Their point of departure for contesting the doctrine of satisfaction is not the theoretical examination of the notion of divine punishments, but the moral estimate of the value of religion which shall make its many-changing theoretical forms to be indifferent. Precisely with reference to the doctrine of reconciliation had Semler’s historical learning opportunity for maintaining the assertion that the Old Testament forms of representation are not essential, if we only hold to the fact that Christ is the Author of the spiritual deliverance of men from their state of misery and liability to punishment (as above, p. 448). He who knows Christ as a mirror of God’s goodness, so that by contemplation of Him a love to God is kindled in the souls of sinners, assuredly has the best knowledge of Christ (p. 445). In disputing the strict idea of satisfaction upon grounds which had already been brought forward in the Illumination, he nevertheless admits that Christ’s sufferings were the consequence of our sins, and that He fulfilled the law for us also, for our benefit. But he recognises the purpose of Christ’s passion not merely in the penal example which it gave, but also in liberation from eternal punishments, making at the same time the reservation that the chastisements for sins subsequently committed are not to be taken away from any one (pp. 462-465). Gruner rids himself completely of the idea of satisfaction. All the more fully does he make use of the idea of merit to express all that Christ did for the benefit of men. Under this head he includes His taking upon Himself the vocation of a founder of religion, His whole righteous life, His endurance of all suffering from the beginning of His life even unto death; but further, the resurrection from the dead, the founding and maintenance of the Church, and the exercise of divine authority. This is in complete agreement with Quenstedt (see above, p. 261). On the other hand, Gruner (as above, p. 414) along with Semler, discerns in Christ’s death a penal example and a pattern of virtue, but also, at the same time, the effectual reason why we should cease to fear as evils the evils of life or even death. “For, if they were so, how could God have permitted them in their full extent to overtake His only-begotten, well-beloved Son? But by the pattern of Christ we are taught that they are no evils to those who know how to bear them, yea, to overcome them by confidence in God.” However nearly the rationalistic stamp of Gruner’s view may approximate the Illumination school, he is separated from it specifically, in a religious point of view, by this avowal. For this estimate of evil, opposed as it is to the impression our sentient nature conveys, he recognises to be a positive effect of historical Christianity; while the Illumination divines gave out that to regard penal evils as blessings is what natural religion teaches, and thus neutralized the impression—traditional yet natural—which the suffering of the innocent was fitted to produce in the way of establishing and heightening human guilt. To the doctrine of justification, the fundamental idea of which he establishes in a correct Protestant form (p. 559), Semler assumes an attitude just as neutral as that which he takes to the different forms of the doctrine of reconciliation. It is not of any importance to him whether Christ’s righteousness be imputed in lack of our innocence, for this formula is not a directly scriptural one. Why then might not one say with equal correctness that the man who fulfils the condition of faith is directly pleasing to God, and has the moral fitness that is necessary for attaining the promised blessings? He goes on to say that undeniably a subjective justification, whereby the man becomes materialiter and formaliter even inhæsive justus, can find place in an evangelical and right manner (pp. 564, 565). “It is thus sufficiently clear, from various considerations of this sort, that the spiritual well-being of a Christian is not bound down to a single series of thoughts and descriptions; but that all depends upon the really new and improved state of the man, which arises as a spiritual result from Christian truth” (p. 567). Gruner abandons this dogmatic neutrality altogether, denying the forensic idea of justification, and instead of it, making bold to prove the Scripture doctrine to be that the beginning of conversion, in other words, the turning away from a life of sin, is the beginning of righteousness. that the forgiveness of sins which makes evils to appear no longer as punishments is indeed connected with justification, but ought to be separated from it in idea, and in a certain sense is a result of it. This advance beyond Semler is in harmony with that principle of moral subjectivism which Semler himself most decidedly maintains. Semler’s neutrality, however, is none the less to be regarded as a characteristic expression of this subjectivism, inasmuch as by these means he sought to establish the existence of his standpoint in the Church; but it is at the same time the expression of his feeling for Church organization, which urged him to keep the rights of private religion in harmony with those of public Church order. By this problem he is quite specifically distinguished from the illuminantists, and for this reason has been to them a stumbling-block.

The weakliness and depressed vitality of the religious and moral principles of the Illumination, particularly in their failure to understand the Christian idea of reconciliation, and in their rejection of it, is so plain that it is superfluous to say another word upon the subject. Historical justice, however, demands that we should add two remarks. For these principles also deliberately rank themselves under the Christian idea of God, and we must recognise it as a quite specific effect of Christianity that the assertion of His Fatherly goodness, and the rejection of the doctrine that His position is analogous to that of the head of a State, are regarded by the illuminati as self-evident. Of course this idea of God accepted by the Illumination was not perfectly in harmony with Christianity, in so far as it quite rejected the analogy between God and a ruler. But there is no retrogression, at all events, to be recognised in so far as it was proposed to make the meaning of God’s name as Father independent both of the arbitrariness which was expressed in the dominium absolutum and of that natural necessity which juridical justice implied. In the line of the former mediæval idea, the Socinians and the Arminians had supposed that they could meet the claims of the Christian name of God by the limiting attribute of reasonable indulgence. With the attribute of juridical justice the theology of the two evangelical confessions had undertaken to co-ordinate the recognition of the grace of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but had narrowed and obscured its significance, for the impression of His habitual justice outweighed that of His actual grace (p. 305). Shall we blame the illuminati for not having sought and found any more satisfying adjustment between the two ideas of God’s grace and God’s justice, when neither their orthodox, nor their pietistic, nor their philosophical teachers had awakened in them a perception of the moral order of the universe as a whole? Nay rather, in comparison with the middle ages, it is an important result of Christian culture that Fatherly Goodness is recognised as the natural representation of God, no longer the universal Being, the ultimate First Cause, the unlimited Will. Just as surely as these fundamental ideas of the scholastic theology fall short of the Christian standard, so surely is that fundamental doctrine of the theologians of the Illumination positively Christian, even though they know it not. It is in comparing it with the middle ages that one recognises the specific superiority of the Illumination period as a whole. For it is the acknowledged merit of the Illumination to have finally cleared away the manifold remaining traces of the continued influence of the middle ages. Comparing it, on the other hand, with orthodox Protestantism, we are led to the conviction that in the Illumination an interest in Christianity is expressed in a direction previously neglected, and very one-sidedly; but that the antithesis between the two forms of Protestantism was so direct and so thorough-going, because the Illumination did not rise to a wider sphere of vision but only obeyed in all its problems impulses which had already been at work in the orthodox period.

This may be observed particularly in the following points. The fundamental position of the Illumination, that God exacts from no man more than his condition and circumstances permit him to give, means that the relation of men to God is determined not by a law which is absolutely binding, but by the rule of ordinary intercourse between man and man. The antithesis between justitia spiritualis and justitia civilis, which the Reformers had maintained, was thus neutralized; and justitia civilis was the only notion recognised. Doubtless this was a fruit of that interfusion of the Church and the State which had developed itself since the Reformation, and which, through the so-called territorial system, had already been modified in the direction of the secularization of religion, and in the direction of Illumination, long ere the latter began its course in the region of theology and morals. But, from the official currency of that Reformation distinction, we must not by any means conclude that in the bosom of the Lutheran and the Reformed Church the task of justitia spiritualis, of dutiful conduct based upon religious character, was taken up and carried out generally and fruitfully at the time when theology and preaching were following most strictly in the line of the doctrinal ideas contained in the symbols. The fact is rather, that public opinion, as it was represented by the ministers of God’s Word, was perfectly satisfied with that relative justitia civilis which is reckoned according to the circumstances and abilities of individuals. Lutheranism, which had never got so far as to develop out of the principle of Christian faith a moral order of life, but which rested satisfied when the law was preached to the unregenerate and the life of the regenerate set on foot by the leading impulses of faith, thankfulness to God, and the Holy Spirit, was accordingly entirely destitute of adequate guidance in ethical matters. As Tholuck expresses it,⁴¹ the general impression which the orthodox period of Lutheranism leaves is, that faith in justification and good works were preached alongside of each other. Life was regulated only by regard to the commands of the law, and the terrors of it were moderated by the consolations of confession and absolution. To the ordinary man it was all the more natural to identify civil with spiritual justice, as the arrangements of the Church bore a police character. Tholuck particularly cites, as a sample of the spiritual characteristics of that time, the funeral sermon preached over the Elector Palatine Frederick IV., which contents itself with the following evidences that the deceased was a child of God: “In spite of a sinful life, his Electoral Highness ever retained in his heart some spark of the fear of God, and some resistance to sin, and therefore never omitted prayer, and always highly esteemed the Word of God; and he never went to such a length in the life of sin as to be impatient of exhortations to reformation from the Word of God.” What is this verdict but a most indulgent application of the principle that God does not require of a man any more than his conditions and circumstances enable him to give? The Illumination accordingly only formulates as a principle what as practice had already been current in the orthodox period. The eudæmonistic theory of the Illumination also cannot justly be regarded as the simple contradictory of any Théodicée, clear and exhaustive in itself, which had dominated the tone of the orthodox period. On the one hand, the inquiry into the cause and purpose of evils had not yet been gone into with the clearness of Schleiermacher; on the other, the view of all penal evil as means divinely employed for the reformation of the subject was only a continuation and generalization of the Christian motive to patience in suffering. But we may convince ourselves, from the hymns for comfort of the afflicted which date from the orthodox period, with what naïveté a thorough eudæmonistic expectation not merely of happiness in the other world, but, in general, of a reversal of the afflictive dispensation, which God may possibly bring about, is conjoined with the considerations that in suffering one has the comfort of God’s nearness, because in it one is following Christ as a pattern, or experiencing God’s loving discipline. With that eudæmonistic tone which also was encouraged in the orthodox school of piety the Illumination stands connected. The distance between the two tendencies therefore as regards the matter under consideration is not that of specific opposition, but of difference in degree,—of difference in the extent assigned to the common conviction, and the emphasis laid upon it.

55. That the theology of the Illumination is more than an episode which could have been prevented, that it was the result of all the joint influences that were working upon theology, even of those which flowed from orthodox tradition, is finally confirmed by the attitude which the defenders of that tradition assumed with reference to the doctrine of the atonement. Those who show the old strictness respecting it⁴² do not at all enter upon the consideration of the opposite arguments. But those who do so depart so far from the strict form of the doctrine they undertake to defend, as to exhibit a difference in degree rather than a specific opposition to the Illumination. The closest approximation to the latter appears in the case of John David Michaelis,⁴³ although, with the Leibnitzian idea of the best possible world, he couples the assumption that God rules the moral commonwealth with the right and the duty of supremacy. If, therefore, it is logically denied that punishments as a whole are designed for the reformation of the subject, then there can be attributed to them only the other subjective purpose of deterring. That Leibnitz explained punishment, particularly eternal punishment, from God’s necessary position towards the commonwealth as such, was not intelligible to Michaelis. And the orthodox view of divine punishments, as revealing the holiness of God and His horror of wickedness, are misunderstood by him in an almost frivolous way, to the effect that a Being who establishes everlasting evil simply in order to reveal His own attributes, the revelation of which no one desired, were deserving of hatred, and could not be regarded as God. He appeals rather, like the Illuminantists, to the goodness of God even in respect of His threat of punishment, which is intended to deter. His fundamental views of sin, and of the relation in which punishment stands to it, are as low as possible. The obligation not to sin is made to rest upon God’s right of punishment, and as standard of moral evil he would set up the physical evil of the mischief which arises from a certain course of action. Michaelis here and there gives way to a perfectly offensive casuistry, in order empirically to establish the relation between punishment and sin; with no better result, however, than, like Töllner, to gain the conviction that the other life will first unfold the experiences which were to be expected. In these inquiries he occasionally approaches the Illuminantists; for example, when he concedes that all punishments in this life are chastisements designed for the reformation of the subject; but he still maintains that, although it be desirable that all punishments should at the same time improve the subject, amelioration is not their universal purpose. That purpose being rather to deter, he on the one side regards as altogether doubtful the inference drawn from God’s goodness that punishments will be remitted to the reformed sinner, and on the other side he refuses to insist upon equivalence between the degree of the punishment and that of the offence. Even eternal punishments, as the natural consequences of sin persevered in, present themselves to him as deterrents, keeping in view as he does the reciprocal relation, which Leibnitz had indicated, between human spirits and the other incorporeal creatures in the civitas Dei. Even for the objects of eternal punishments he concedes to Eberhard, that a merciful visitation is not inconceivable; but he declares it unlikely, in view of the consideration that Christ has suffered punishment and applied the dispensation of grace for those who acknowledge Him as their Mediator. If Michaelis in this seems to follow the traditionary doctrine, it is worthy of note that in the short discussion of Christ’s penal satisfaction, with which the book closes, the thought of penal example is insinuated into that theory. He does not here take into consideration any of the objections raised by Faustus Socinus against the Protestant doctrine, not entering at all into their connexion; but as he applies the general assumption of the purpose of deterring to the case in which Christ took upon Himself to endure punishment, he contents himself with defending this view by the consideration that Christ had merited no penal suffering by sins of His own, and that His consent thereto excludes the suspicion of injustice having been done to him (volenti non fit injuria).

The other theologians, also, who maintain more distinctly than Michaelis does, the traditional theory of Christ’s penal satisfaction, associate with it the very disparate view of Grotius. But in Michaelis himself it is very clearly shown that the traditionary doctrine had become unintelligible, because its premisses had fallen away. The punishment of Christ in the room of the sinful human race as a whole, stood originally connected with the implication in guilt which by Adam had been brought upon the whole race. The guilt of original sin was regarded as infinite, because it had done despite to the honour and law of the infinite God; and the punishments which Christ took upon himself were those of eternal condemnation, which no individual could essentially augment by the amount of his actual sin. Exposure to eternal condemnation readily presented itself as an arbitrary judicial punishment, because original sin itself was regarded only half as a natural heritage, while it was further regarded as a positive judgment with which God visited Adam’s act. This connexion had already been broken up by Leibnitz (pp. 333-4). Michaelis prosecutes the undertaking. Leibnitz had declared that he had not yet adequately considered the thought of the infinite demerit of sin, upon which the eternity of future punishment was based, so as to be able to pronounce an opinion upon it (p. 335). Michaelis makes up for this, laying down, like Duns (p. 60), the rule in accordance with which Anselm originally had measured that assertion. The odiousness of the crime and the magnitude of the punishment, according to that rule, increase in proportion to the dignity of the person against whom it is committed. Since, now, God is the infinite Being, sin is of infinite demerit, and liable to infinite punishment. But here Michaelis finds the fallacy of conclusio a particulari ad universale. The rule is drawn from the crimes of regicide or of læsa majestas, which are more severely punished than the analogous offences committed against private persons. But in crimes, such as theft, which violate the common law, he finds no gradation of punishment according as they are committed only in a free city, earldom, principality, or in an electorate, kingdom or empire; in other words, according as they have offended a higher authority. “Consequently our sins will not merit infinite punishment, merely because they are committed against a Divine law.” Moreover, treasonable acts can disturb the peace of the state, but the boldest blasphemy cannot injure God in the least. Finally, the purpose of deterring excludes the possibility that the amount of the punishment is regulated in accordance with the inherent odiousness of the crime. It might a priori have been conjectured that Leibnitz’s verdict upon the question would not follow so closely in the line of the imperial jurisprudence of Göttingen as that of Michaelis, although both were members of the judicial Privy Council of the Electorate of Hanover; but that the former would argue after the manner of his philosophical colleague of the Franciscan order. But the substantial agreement between Michaelis and Duns is further completed by the assertion the former makes, that Paul, by the universal death which followed upon Adam’s sin, is as far as possible from intending eternal death. It is impossible validly to dispute the exegetical accuracy of this assumption, though we need not commit ourselves to the position, that by the universal consequence of the sin of Adam must be understood the loss of immortality which the eating of the poisonous fruit of the tree of knowledge occasioned. These negations being premised, the thought which Leibnitz maintains comes forward all the more obtrusively,—that eternal punishments are not attached to original sin in an arbitrary way, but are the natural consequences of sin persevered in to a specific degree. In this sense of constant continuance in sin, Duns also had admitted the assumption of infinite sin. Now, Michaelis alleges, on behalf of his idea, no reasons that surpass those which Leibnitz gave, and which Lessing also has developed in his treatise against Eberhard, Leibnitz von den ewigen Strafen (1770).⁴⁴ The sin therefore, which at Leibnitz’s suggestion was regarded as individualized, which in the light of God’s efforts against it was distinguished into final sin, and sin admitting of repentance, occasioned quite different views of what the act which should secure liberation from punishment must imply. For if, at the outset, eternal punishment had not to be endured by the whole race, but only by the individuals who, irrespective of redemption, should sin infinitely, it came to be necessary, not only that the punishment should be endured on their behalf, but also that, by penal example, they should be deterred from continuance in sin. The grounds upon which the idea of Grotius finds acceptance, alongside of the doctrine of penal satisfaction, in the half-orthodox circles of this period, are therefore other than those upon which it had been substituted by its author for the thought of penal satisfaction.

The purpose of Michaelis to take together the two meanings of the death of Christ as a penal satisfaction, and as a penal example, is carried out more clearly by other theologians related to him.⁴⁵ But this very grouping together of two thoughts, which are so diverse in their origin, in itself betrays that the idea of penal satisfaction, which is retained out of deference to ecclesiastical tradition, continues to pass current only under very different conditions. The theologians of this class, in the first place, follow their opponents into the field of purely biblico-theological investigation, and reject more or less decidedly the peculiar church-forms of the doctrine. Particularly, the premiss of God’s habitual penal justice, and therefore of His personal concern in Christ’s substitutionary endurance of punishment, is no longer shared by them. The theory of the wrath of God, in which tradition had invested that thought, made them regard it altogether with suspicion. In this way also is gained only a relative necessity of Christ’s death towards the purpose of the forgiveness of sins, which God’s love proposed. In this respect these Lutheran theologians offer the right hand of fellowship over Arminianism to the Thomists. Naturally they reject also all the detailed determinations of the old school respecting the formal equivalence between Christ’s passion and the eternal condemnation of sinners, as already had been done by the otherwise orthodox J. D. Heilmann.⁴⁶ This circumstance, taken along with the interests of the doctrine of the penal example in Christ’s death, is enough to explain why Seiler and Döderlein affirm with more or less clearness that the penal satisfaction given in the death of Christ was not designed to propitiate God so much as to soothe the alarms of men. Even when Storr, at the same time, vindicates the reference to God’s justice, he only intends to say thereby that God’s providence ordained Christ’s penal satisfaction for the vindication of the law, in order thereby to make us more heedful of the beneficent commands of God. In the case of the others there is no word even of this reference to the law in Christ’s substitutionary work. There is, therefore, no proper sequence when Seiler maintains the independent satisfactory value of Christ’s active obedience; Döderlein, on the contrary, expressly rejects this assumption, while the others do not enter upon its consideration. As against the Illuminantists, however, these theologians are unanimous in maintaining that by the authority of the New Testament, when rightly understood, the death of Christ is to be regarded as the immediate instrumental cause of our gracious acceptance, and not mediately only on condition of our reformation. But at the same time they participate sufficiently in that regard to ethical interests which characterizes the Illumination, to discern at every possible turn the impulse to reformation which is secured by the proof of God’s love in the death of Christ. In part also they follow the hint given by Leibnitz to look for the significance of Christ’s penal example in the moral conformation of the spiritual world beyond the grave.⁴⁷ On the other hand, as against the Illuminantists, represented by Gruner (p. 372), it is pointed out that the sense of the beneficence of divine chastisements for believers proceeds first from the forgiveness of sins, which is secured by the death of Christ. Yet here again it comes out as a characteristic of this group of theologians, that one writer who is distinctly conscious of belonging to them, and explicitly avows himself to be a disciple of Morus—Ch. A. Schwarze⁴⁸—disavows the interpretation of Christ’s death, both as a penal satisfaction and as a penal example, that he expressly rejects the thought of its usefulness for the angels, and, quite in the Socinian style, treats it as a confirmation of His doctrine, and also as a condition of His personal exaltation. For what is the value of the thought of forgiveness of sins if it be regarded merely as remission of punishment, and if nothing but deliverance from the punishments that had been deserved be associated with Christ’s satisfaction? Döderlein and Knapp expressly declare no otherwise that does Löffler the illuminantist (p. 366) that, in this connexion, a removal of the guilt and of the consciousness of guilt cannot be thought of. For as God does not err, He cannot judge that the sinner is guiltless, and his conscience will always convince the sinner that he has sinned; but it is not necessary, and it does not conduce to the true pacification of the sinner, to know that the guilt of sin is forgiven if he only know himself to be delivered from punishment (Knapp, ii. p. 251). When the essence of evangelical Christianity is trifled away in this fashion, Socinianism has the most perfect right to exist. But how is Knapp (who in other respects is praised to the skies as a guardian of the sanctuary) put to shame by the illuminantist Töllner! When once the correct observation obtruded itself that the punishment, or the penal satisfaction of another party, as a legal act, cannot undo the moral blame, it was at least an indication of religious tact, when Töllner (p. 357) appealed to the free grace of God, in order to establish in Christianity the removal of moral guilt also. But that Knapp should leave this guilt of sin, as something which does not need to be taken away from between man and God, betokens unconscious despair of Christianity. That despair is manifestly to be attributed to that dulness of thought which is the inseparable result of abject subjection to theological tradition.

Of the monographs belonging to this group, the dissertation appended by Storr to his exposition of his Epistle to the Hebrews merits special attention. The mosaic-work of New Testament expressions which he has pieced together in order to refute the theory of the Illumination, that reconciliation is connected with the death of Christ through the instrumentality of reformation, is the first attempt at biblico-theological method within the limits of Lutheranism. His view is not, of course, on that account, quite independent of the shape of the dogmatic Lutheran doctrine of the atonement, but at the same time it brings about in one point an important correction in that doctrine, which unintentionally leads into the path of Reformed theology. As the Lutheran form of this doctrine was throughout determined rather by certain dogmatic postulates than by consecutive exegesis, Storr’s exhibition of the doctrine is a not insignificant proof of the possibility of deciding the confessional disputes in this doctrine by reference to the New Testament as a rule. I do not understand how Baur (p. 541) can assert that Storr developed his theory upon the basis of the idea of a penal example in the death of Christ. For this assumption is, in the case of Storr, as in the case of the theologians who are allied to him, only appended to a recognition of the penal satisfaction of the death of Christ, and the series of ideas which Baur reproduces in the passage which has been cited has absolutely nothing to do with penal example. Storr abides by the path of Lutheran orthodoxy in distinguishing forgiveness of sins or remission of punishment, and beatification or justification as two operations of Christ; but he ceases to be orthodox in pointing to Christ’s death (obedientia passiva) as the only ground of the former negative result, and to Christ’s active obedience as the ground of the positive salutary effect. For he indirectly denies that the active obedience has independent and satisfactory value, as well as the death, towards the abolition of the law for believers. For on the one hand his view as a whole is not dominated by the consideration that the law holds good absolutely and essentially for God; and, on the other hand, he holds Christ, as a creature, to be bound to obedience towards God. The law indicates only the beneficent intention of God for the public ordering of the universe, and accordingly it was of importance to Storr only that, in the bestowal of grace upon us, the law should not be entirely evaded. It has in fact been respected, and indirectly confirmed, by Christ’s undertaking to give penal satisfaction; although Storr does not venture to assert formal equivalence between Christ’s sufferings and the punishment due to humanity, but will have it that the sufferings of Christ, which in the case of sinners would be punishments, only pass as such in His case.⁴⁹ In the entire obedience of Christ, which reaches its climax in His voluntary passion, Storr moreover includes that which, as the material of Christ’s merit, is regarded by Quenstedt (p. 261) as the ground of positive justification or beatification. But Storr views this prestation after the Reformed manner, maintaining that by it Christ earned also as a reward (sibi ipsi meruit) the majesty which pertained to Him by nature. “As Christ’s obedience was made more splendid by His suffering of death, so was also the honour which He on account of that obedience reaped from the consequent enjoyment of His glory.” And this consists herein, that He is “able to permit His brethren, who ordinarily had no claim to heavenly glory, also to enjoy the great blessedness to which He had a natural right in His own person” (pp. 664-669). This train of thought has suggested Anselm and the Socinians to Baur; it might suggest Thomas, Duns, and the Reformed divines just as much (p. 263). Of course the theory of the latter is plainly as unfamiliar to Storr as to Baur; otherwise with its help he would have found material enough in the New Testament for explaining how the glory which Christ earned is extended to His brethren also, in the fact that He acted and suffered in the capacity of Head of the kingdom of God. Not having this point of view, Storr does not indeed exclude the possibility seized hold of by Baur, of being understood in the Socinian sense, that the connexion of men’s blessedness with Christ’s glorification depends upon an arbitrary arrangement made by God (p. 309). But still, as Storr recognises, in opposition to the Socinians, the penal satisfaction of Christ, he has much closer analogy with the Reformed party than with the Socinians in the question before us; and Baur would doubtless have refrained from instituting the comparison had he been acquainted with the Reformed doctrine.

In Storr’s essay we are to recognise the positive fruit which, as regards method, the period of the Illumination was able to yield. For the doctrine of reconciliation, which had become the subject of so much controversy, it was essential to discover the connexion of the New Testament representations, apart from the formulae and tendencies of the several dogmatic systems; partly in order to judge with certainty of their accordance with Scripture, partly in order to gain religious points of view which, up to that time, had been overlooked by the contending parties. That everything was not gained in the first attempt is clear; neither does the neutrality towards many distinctions of theological parties, which is shown by Storr, guarantee that the biblico-theological material is exhausted; nor is his exhibition of the doctrine in some of its main features independent of the shape of that confessional system of doctrine in which Storr had been brought up. But this can all the less be brought forward to his disadvantage, because we still, after the lapse of eighty years, have to contest the first steps in a really biblico-theological method of investigation.

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Footnotes

1. This applies to the last important theologian of the party, Samuel Crell, grandson of John Crell; also to George Markos, of Klausenburg, in Transylvania, author of a Summa Universæ Theologiæ Christianæ secundum Unitarios in usum auditorum theologiæ concinnata (1787). Comp. Fock, l. c. pp. 240, 261, 649 sq. ↩

2. Theologia Revelata Dogmatica, tom. i. p. 29. ↩

3. Colloquium heptaplomeres de abditis rerum arcanis, written in 1588. ↩

4. De veritate, prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso: Paris, 1624. De religione gentilium, errorumque apud eos causis: London, 1645; Complete, Amsterd. 1663. ↩

5. Tindal: Christianity as old as the Creation, or the Gospel a republication of the Religion of Nature: London, 1730. Chubb: The true Gospel of Jesus Christ Asserted: London, 1738. ↩

6. Compare Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, p. 448 sq. ↩

7. It was gradually put together between 1657 and 1740, and represents an unbroken Lutheran tradition, for only a small portion of the hymns is of Pietistic origin. ↩

8. A Lutheran theologian, untinged with Pietism, once refused to allow me to draw the idea of prayer from the destiny of the elect Church εἰς ἔπαινον τῆς δόξης τῆς χάριτος τοῦ Θεοῦ (Eph. i. 6), but maintained that the primary aspect of prayer is the wrestling of the penitent spirit with God. In my opinion, however, this last is worth anything exactly in the degree in which it rises to the level of thankfulness for that grace, which also first renders penitential wrestling possible (see above, p. 143)—to that thankfulness in which first the supplicant assumes his active attitude within the Church, Phil. iv. 6. ↩

9. H. Schmid: Geschichte des Pietismus, p. 191. ↩

10. Essais de théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal. 1710. ↩

11. Grotius maintains indeed retributive punishment in relation to God’s justice, while representing it as unsuited to the use of man. ↩

12. Dippel has briefly summarized his repeatedly expressed objections to the Church-doctrine of reconciliation in his Hauptsumma der theologischen Grundlehren des Democriti, 1733. They are to be found along with the refutation of them by Canz in Reinbeck’s Betrachtungen über die Augsburgische Confession, fortgesetzt von Canz, 5 Theil; pp. 476-498. ↩

13. De regimine Dei universali sive jurisprudentia civitatis Dei publica, 1731. Ed. novissima 1744. ↩

14. Compare Kuno Fischer: Leibnitz und seine Schule, p. 522 sq. ↩

15. In what follows I refer to Wolf’s Vernünftige Gedanken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen, 1720; Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen, 1721, 4th ed. 1736. Compare Erdmann: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 197 sq. ↩

16. See above, p. 188, note. In like manner Luther, Catech. Major (Hase: libri symb. p. 497): Christianorum communio mater est, hæc quemlibet Christianum parturit ac alit per verbum. ↩

17. Geschichte des Rationalismus. Erste Abth. (1865), p. 1. ↩

18. Beiträge zur Kirchenverfassungsgeschichte und Kirchenpolitik, i. p. 474. ↩

19. Der thätige Gehorsam Christi untersucht, Breslau, 1768. Of Lutheran theologians previous to Töllner, Haferung in Wittenberg, and Christopher Francke in Kiel, both of them flourishing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, stood alone in making the assertion (which is inconsistent with orthodoxy) that Christ fulfilled the law for Himself also. Compare Fr. Walch: De obedientia Christi activa dissertatio inauguralis, Gottingae, 1754; p. 70. ↩

20. La Placette (preacher at Copenhagen): Traité de la Justification, 1733. The co-ordination of the active with the passive obedience as a means of satisfaction to God rests, we know, on the presupposition that God’s justice and the law are the highest rules of the moral order of the world, to which the attribute of grace is subordinate (p. 305). The point of La Placette’s argumentation is (p. 190), that he regards the goodness of God as the ground on which salvation is bestowed, and that it comes into operation as soon as Christ’s penal satisfaction has removed the obstacle to its manifestation. ↩

21. That Töllner was Reformed, as Dorner asserts in his Lehre von der Person Christi, ii. p. 954, is merely an inference drawn from the fact that the theological faculty of Frankfort on the Oder officially bore the Reformed name. From the course of Töllner’s book, as that has been described, I conclude that he was a Lutheran. For the Lutheran tradition of the doctrine offers the starting-point from which his treatise proceeds; and Töllner manifestly stands at a distance from the Reformed tradition. ↩

22. As above, pp. 494, 495. ↩

23. “All ways of explaining Christ’s atoning death amount to the same thing.” The first part in the second volume of his Theologische Untersuchungen, pp. 316-35. ↩

24. Compare my Geschichtl. Studien zur christl. Lehre von Gott. (Art. iii., Jahrb. für deutsche Theol. xiii. p. 268.) ↩

25. This is the case in his tract Beweis dass Gott die Menschen bereits durch seine Offenbarung in der Natur zur Seligkeit führt (1766), p. 208 sq. ↩

26. Thätiger Gehorsam Christi, p. 664. ↩

27. In like manner he insists in the treatise cited above (Beweis, etc., p. 106 sq.) that even if God by the revelation which He has made in nature brings men to blessedness, the plan of salvation revealed in Scripture is not thereby superseded or changed. For God’s revelation in nature does not imply that human nature is not destroyed by sin (p. 103) and demands the use of means whereby confidence towards God may be awakened (p. 116). ↩

28. Die göttlichen Strafen und die göttliche Strafgerechtigkeit, in his Theol. Untersuchungen, ii. 1. p. 140-177. ↩

29. As above, p. 138. ↩

30. Von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen, p. 293. ↩

31. Neue Apologie des Socrates oder Untersuchung von der Seligkeit der Heiden, vol. i. 1772 (3d ed. 1788); vol. ii. 1788 contains a more elaborate and defensive treatment of single parts of the first volume. ↩

32. System der reinen Philosophie oder Glückseligkeitslehre des Christenthums, 1778, 2d. ed. 1780. On the other hand, the analogous investigation of the idea of Divine punishment made by C. F. Bahrdt (Apologie der gesunden Vernunft durch Gründe der Schrift unterstützt, in Bezug auf die christliche Versöhnungslehre 1781), and by J. F. Ch. Löffler (Ueber die kirchl. Genugthuungslehre; two tracts of the years 1789, 1805 to be found in the first vol. of his minor works, 1817) are without speciality or remarkable strictness. ↩

33. Baier: Theol. Positiva, Pars ii. cap. 1 sec. 15: Culpa est relatio quædam ex peccato in ordine ad legem considerato resultans,—importat obligationem, qua quis sub peccato, per ipsum peccatum constrictus tenetur, ut revera sit et dicatur peccator. Hollaz: Examen theol., Pars ii. cap. 2, qu. 18: Culpa est fœditas vel deformitas moralis ex actu legi difformi et creaturæ rationali indecoro resultans, ac per modum turpis maculæ peccatori adhærens. Reatus culpæ est obligatio, qua homo sub peccato quasi constrictus tenetur ut peccator detestabilis censeatur. ↩

34. A whole series of the discussions in Töllner’s Theol. Untersuchungen follows the line of showing that the consciousness of guilt in unintentional actions which are contrary to the law is unfounded. ↩

35. In this direction, certain English writers of the seventeenth century, like Curcellæus (p. 315) before them, had opposed the orthodox assumption that the sin of the sacrificer was transferred to the sacrificial victim, and in it punished by death. Instead of this, Arthur Sykes (Essay on the nature, design, and origin of sacrifices, London, 1746, published in a German translation with preface by Semler at Halle in 1778) viewed the sacrifice with regard chiefly to the sacrificial meal as actual display of friendship with God, —John Taylor (The Scripture doctrine of atonement examined in relation to Jewish sacrifices and to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, London, 1751; German translation, 1773) regarding them as penitent supplications for the mercy of God, analogous to prayer. Both hypotheses are combated by James Richie (Criticism of modern notions of sacrifices, London, 1761). I have not seen this book; but in the preface to the translation of Sykes, Semler indicates that he agrees with both the others in repudiating the penal value of the Old Testament sacrifices. Taylor develops, from his theory of sacrifices, the thought that God, for the sake of Christ’s obedience persevered in by Him until death, has forgiven sins just as on other occasions He has done so for the sake of the virtue, the piety, the prayer of others; of Moses, for example. But this view of the way in which men were represented by the sacrificial death of Christ does not come into a leading position of prominence, but is outweighed by the opposite assumption that the death of Christ reconciles men inasmuch as it incites them to holiness in repentance, and in the imitation of His virtue. This view amounts accordingly to a combination of the teachings of Duns and of Abelard. ↩

36. In this John William Schmid of Jena, a Kantian, who reverts to the standpoint of the Illumination, agrees with him. Compare his work Ueber christl. Religion als Volkslehre und Wissenschaft (1797), p. 307. ↩

37. Lineamenta institutionum fidei Christianæ historico-criticarum. 1795. ↩

38. Here ought to be mentioned that movement, parallel to the German Illumination, which led several English divines to Socinianism. (Compare Fock, as above, p. 269 sq.) The application of this tendency to denial of the doctrine of reconciliation is made in Joseph Priestley’s Theological Repository, vol. i. (1769), in two anonymous treatises, The end of the Life and Death of Christ, and Essay on the Sacrifice of Christ (the former probably by the editor). The positive views inculcated respecting the death and resurrection of Christ, and respecting the forgiveness of sins that flows from the acceptance of His doctrine, are directly Socinian. The scriptural expressions regarding the sacrificial value of the death of Christ, are understood in the vague sense of a self-denying laborious exertion for the behoof of mankind. Eberhard has appropriated many of the biblico-theological arguments that are adduced in support of this thesis. This Socinianism led its supporters to the formation of the new Unitarian churches, but it comes short of the sphere of thought of the Illumination theologians in the Lutheran Church. ↩

39. Versuch einer freiern theologischen Lehrart. 1777. ↩

40. Institutiones theologiæ dogmaticæ. 1777. ↩

41. Das kirchliche Leben des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. 1 Abth. (1861) p. 202. Comp. pp. 212, 268. ↩

42. Franc. Walch: Breviarium theologiæ dogmaticæ. 1775. J. Ben. Carpzow: Liber doctrinalis purioris theologiæ. 1776. Chr. F. Sartorius: Compendium theologiæ dogmaticæ. 1782. Compare Gass: Geschichte d. protestant. Dogmatik, vol. iv. pp. 100, 110, 113. ↩

43. Gedanken über die Lehre der heil. Schrift von Sünde und Genugthuung, als eine der Vernunft gemässe Lehre, Neue Ausgabe, 1779. ↩

44. Eberhard, in spite of his intended denial of that theme, has not been able to avoid recognising the endless effects of sin in Leibnitz’s sense. But, at the same time, the reply which Lessing directed against him is connected with such an inclination to his views, that in the second volume of his Neue Apologie des Socrates, Eberhard was able to show that the difference between them was not fundamental. ↩

45. G. F. Seiler: Theologia dogmatico-polemica cum compendio historiae dogmatum, 1774. Ueber den Versöhnungstod Jesu Christi, 2 Theile; 1778. J. Chr. Döderlein: Institutio theologi christiani, 2 Tomi; 1780. S. F. N. Morus: Epitome theologiae Christianae, 1789. G. Ch. Storr: Pauli Brief an die Hebräer erläutert. ” Zweiter Theil: Ueber den eigentlichen Zweck des Todes Jesu, 1789. Doctrinae christianae pars theoretica e sacris literis repetita, 1793. G. Ch. Knapp: Vorlesungen über die christl. Glaubenslehre (unchanged since 1789), 2 Theile; 1827. F. B. Reinhard: Vorlesungen über die Dogmatik, 1801. That all these theologians recognise in Christ’s death in the first instance penal satisfaction, and then penal example only secondarily, is not clearly brought out in the account given of them by Baur, p. 537 seq. ↩

46. Compendium theologiae dogmaticae, 1761. ↩

47. Baur, p. 554, here thinks of Origen, being less familiar with the Théodicée of Leibnitz. ↩

48. Ueber den Tod Jesu als ein wesentliches Stück seines wohlthätigen Planes zur Beglückung des menschlichen Geschlechtes. 1795. ↩

49. Bemerkungen über Kant’s philosophische Religionslehre (1794), p. 20. ↩