By Theodore Haering, D.D. Translated from the second revised and enlarged German edition, 1912, by John Dickie, M.A., and George Ferries, D.D. Two volumes. London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton. 1913.1
Haering’s “Der christliche Glaube” was published in the autumn of 1906, and was briefly but sufficiently noticed in this Review for January, 1908 (pp. 166–167), by Dr. C. W. Hodge. The appearance of an English translation of its second edition—which was published in 1912—would in itself call for nothing more than an intimation of that fact, with some remarks, perhaps, upon the nature and extent of the changes introduced into the second edition, and the quality of the English rendering. On the former matter there is no need to enter into detail: the changes made are rather of the nature of expansions than of alterations. Of the latter matter we cannot speak with entire satisfaction. The sense of the original is doubtless conveyed in the translation. But the clearness with which the original was credited by its German readers (“marvelously perspicuous” is Titius’ characterization of it) is certainly conspicuously absent from the translation; and all the charm which they also attribute to the book as a popular religious discussion is dissipated. We have found the reading of the English version somewhat heavy going.
An adventitious importance has been given to the English translation, however, by the unmeasured (and let us say at once, gravely misleading) praise which has, on the occasion of its appearance, been lavished on the treatise. An influential journal, widely circulated in both hemispheres, for example, announces it as “theology at its best.” Had the proper qualification been inserted, and the book announced merely as Ritschlian theology at its best, little exception would need to be taken to the characterization. Haering’s theology is exceptionally good Ritschlian theology. But no Ritschlian theology can be really good theology. Ritschlianism would not be unfairly described as the form taken in the later years of the nineteenth century by Socinianism, squeezed into the molds of Neo-Kantian philosophizing. And in the nature of the case, Socinian theology is bad theology, no matter in what philosophical garb—and, we may add, no matter with what religious fervor—it may be set forth. Haering brought to the exposition of Ritschlianism a warm religious nature, deeply steeped in Swabian Pietism, and, from the publication of his maiden-book (“Ueber das Bleibende im Glauben an Christus,” 1880) in the first days of “the movement” (the first literary symptom of the existence of “the school” was the publication in 1876 of Herrmann’s “Die Metaphysik in der Theologie”), he has been diligently engaged in pouring the new wine into these old bottles. The wine has in the process no doubt taken on some of the flavor of the bottles, but the bottles have certainly burst. Despite the many modifications it has received at his hands—all of them, happily, in the direction of a fuller recognition of essential Christian truth—and despite the profoundly religious tone which he has cast over the whole exposition, what Haering gives us remains just Ritschlianism, and that is to say just Socinianism—Ritschlianism, Socinianism in the richest religious expression possible to them, perhaps, but Ritschlianism, Socinianism still.
When we say Ritschlianism, however, we say not only Socinianism but Socinianism in a decadent form. A quarter of a century has elapsed since Albrecht Ritschl died (1889), and the stir which his theological teaching began to make during the last decade of his life has already quieted down, and the movement which he inaugurated has largely merged in the general course of unevangelical thought. Perhaps it would be too much to say that his system has been already “relegated to the ineffectual past,” for there still remain with us men of mark—among whom Haering holds a conspicuous place—who have drawn a great part of their inspiration from it. But these are mostly men somewhat advanced in life; and it is not without its pathetic side to witness the publication by them, in their declining years, of system after system of a dogmatics, which, to put it brusquely, has had its day. There may not be wanting, indeed, some indications that the true state of the case is not altogether concealed from themselves, and that, in presenting their several transcripts of the Ritschlian system, they write consciously as much as historians of thought as they do as religious teachers. Haering, for example, not only makes no pretense of writing “definitive dogmatics,” but even asserts roundly that there cannot be any such thing: “the dogmatics of any one generation,” he repeatedly declares, “comes in the next to belong only to the history of dogma” (e.g. p. 21). He has even erected what he calls “the mutability of dogmatics” itself into a dogma, and finds for it crisp gnomic expression. “Theologies,” he remarks (Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, xx. 1910, p. 166), “change as doth a garment, and only the gospel abides.”