1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Theology - Wikisource, the free online library

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Theology - Wikisource, the free online library
Jump to content
From Wikisource
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
Theognis of Megara
1911
Encyclopædia Britannica
Volume 26
Theology
by
Robert Mackintosh
Theon, Aelius
sister projects
Wikipedia article
quotes
course
Wikidata item
See also
Theology
on
Wikipedia
; and our
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer
1943907
1911
Encyclopædia Britannica
Volume 26
— Theology
Robert Mackintosh
THEOLOGY,
literally the science which deals with God or the gods. The word is Greek (
Θεός
, God;
λόγος
, theory). But doctrine counted for less in Greek or Roman religion than in Christianity, and forms of worship for more. In the oldest usage
θεολόγοι
were those who dealt in myths, like Hesiod and like the supposed Orpheus, the
θεολόγος
par excellence. Paul Natorp
contends that
θεολογία
in Plato's
Republic
refers wholly to the control of myths. He further denies that Aristotle identified his First Philosophy with a "theology," holding the text of the
Metaphysics
to be out of order and
corrupted, though from a very early period. He regards the
Stoics as having initiated a philosophical theology, and gives
numerous references for the “three theologies” which they
distinguished. Philo the Jew is also quoted as using
θεολόγος
of poets, of Moses
par excellence
, and of Greek philosophers. It
is possible that the epithet
θεολόγος
for St John may go back
as far as Papias. This is the first appearance of the term upon
Christian ground. The primitive application of
θεολόγοι
to
the poets and myth-fanciers meets us again in Church writers;
but there is also a tendency to use the name for a philosophical
theology based on the doctrine of the Logos. In this sense
Gregory Nazianzen also receives the title
θεολόγος
. His
περὶ θεολόγας
is a dissertation on the knowledge of God.
Many centuries later Abelard generalized the expression in
books which came to bear the titles
Theologia Christiana
and
Introductio ad Theologiam
. (Abelard speaks himself of “theologia nostra.”)
It is of interest to note that even in these
books the Trinity and Christology are the topics of outstanding
importance. In the
Summa Theologiae
of Thomas Aquinas the
technical sense is fully established. Except in special circumstances which generally explain themselves,
e.g.
“Homeric Theology” (a book by Nägelsbach), Old Testament Theology,
Comparative Theology, Natural Theology, the word in modern
languages means the theology of the Christian Church. What
follows here will be confined to that subject.
While the word points to God as the special theme of the
theologian, other topics inevitably find entrance. Theistic
philosophy thinks of God as the absolute being; and
every monotheistic religion insists, not indeed that
the knowledge of God includes all knowledge, but
Contents of theology.
that this supremely important knowledge throws fresh light
upon everything. So, with an added Christian intensity, St
Paul declares: “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature;
the old things are passed away; behold, they are become
new. But all things are of God, who reconciled us to himself
through Christ” (2 Cor. v. 17, 18). A minimum division might
be threefold—
Gottesbegriff
Selbstbeurteilung
Weltanschauung
But historically it is more important to note that Christian
theology has developed as a doctrine concerning Christ: his
relation to God, our relation to God in or through him. For
Christ is viewed as bringing redemption—a conception of importance in many religions, but in none so important as in Christianity. Indeed, another possibility opens up here. Instead of being mainly a doctrine concerning God, or one concerning Christ, theology may be construed as being mainly the
theory of Christian experience. Most schools of theology will
concur, however, in giving prominence to a complementary point
of view and making their systems a study of Divine
revelation
Even if they accept Natural Theology, they generally hold that
Christian theology, properly so called, begins at a further point.
Those who deny this were formerly called Naturalists,
i.e.
deniers of
supernatural
revelation; those who extend the
province of reason in theology, and push back the frontier
of revelation, are often called Rationalists.
Such being the
usual point of view, it is plain that the claim of
Theology as a science.
theology to be a science, or a group of sciences, is
made in a sense of its own in so far as theology is
orderly, coherent, systematic, and seeks to rest upon good
grounds of some sort, it may be called a science. But, in so far
as it claims to deal with special revelation, it lifts itself out of
the circle of the sciences, and turns away from natural knowledge
towards what it regards as more intimate messages from
God.
Two special usages should be noted: (1) a medieval use of
“theology” for mystical or intuitive knowledge of God, as in the
well-known book called
Theologia Germanica;
(2) “theology
proper,” in Protestant systems, is the portion of theology which
deals directly with the doctrine of God.
Another characteristic of theology is its secondary and
reflective character. Religion, therefore, is earlier than theology.
Or the theology which religion contains is in
a state of solution—vaguely defined and suffused
with emotion; important practically, but intellectually
Theology and Religion.
unsatisfying. “Scientific” theology contrasts with this
as a laboratory extract. History may soften the contrast by
discovering transitional forms, and by showing the religious
interest at work in theology as well as the scientific interest
affecting early utterances of religion. Still, this contrast enters
into the meaning of divines when they say that they are at
work upon a science. A religious man need no more, be a
theologian than a poet need have a theory of aesthetics.
Where, then, are we to look for Christian theology? It is
not the truism it may seem if we reply that we are to find it
in the writings of theologians. As authorities controlling
their work, theologians may name the Bible,
or tradition, or the religious consciousness, or the Church, or
Sources.
some combination of these. But the teaching of the Bible is
not systematic, and the authority of consciousness is vague;
while the creeds into which Church tradition crystallizes emerge
out of long theological discussions. Ordinarily, doctrine has
been in close connexion not only with edification but with controversy.
Anselm of Canterbury stands almost alone among
the great theological masters in working purely from a scientific
interest; this holds alike of his contribution to theism and of
his doctrine of Atonement. Among the earlier theological statements
are catechetical books,
e.g.
Cyril of Jerusalem. These
books record doctrinal instruction given, for practical ends, to
laymen of adult years who were candidates for baptism. Disinterested
discussions by experts for experts is medieval rather
than primitive. Modern catechisms in the form of question and
answer for the instruction of baptized children are sometimes
convenient if dry summaries of doctrine (
e.g.
the Westminster
Assembly’s
Shorter Catechism
); but sometimes they have the
glow of religious tenderness, like Luther’s
Lesser Catechism
, or
the
Heidelberg Catechism
. They generally expound (1) The
Apostles’ Creed, (2) the Ten Commandments, (3) the Lord’s
Prayer. Medieval theology has an appearance of keeping in
touch with the Apostles’ Creed when it divides the substance
of doctrine into (usually) twelve “articles”—not always the
same twelve—a reminiscence of the legendary composition of
the Creed in twelve sections by the twelve apostles. This
treatment, however, has little real influence upon the structure
of medieval theology. German Protestant writers, again, following
their catechisms, often distinguish three articles—of the
Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This, too, is no more
than convenient phraseology.
Before the Christian age, there had been a good deal of reflective
thinking in the Jewish schools, though the interest there was legal
rather than speculative. To some extent Christianity inherited
this Jewish theology. True, Jesus Christ sprang
from the people. He was a “layman” (Paul Wernle) without
Jewish theology.
technical Jewish lore. The great attainment of the Old Testament, ethical monotheism, had become the common property of the
nation; it occurs in Christianity as a simple presupposition. Early
Christian writers find it unnecessary to prove what no one dreams of
questioning. Along with this great doctrine there pass on into Christianity
the slowly attained hope of resurrection and the dreadful
doctrine of future punishment for the wicked. Leading thoughts in
the teaching of Jesus, so far as they are new, are the Fatherhood of
God—new at least in the central place given it—the imminence
of the “kingdom” or judgment of God, and Jesus’ own place as
Messiah,
i.e.
as king (and as judge). The “second founder” of
Christianity, Paul of Tarsus, was indeed rabbinically trained. His
St Paul.
recoil from Judaism is all the more intense because of
the special intellectual presuppositions which he continues to share with Judaism. In many respects, Pauline Christianity is the obverse of the Pharisaic creed. Modern Christians are
tempted to charge the seeming extravagance of St Paul’s thought
upon his Jewish inheritance, while modern Jews are tempted to
stigmatize them as grotesque exaggerations of reasonable rabbinical
doctrines. Probably both are right, and both wrong. The germs
were Jewish; but, transported to a new soil, and watered with a
new enthusiasm, they assumed new forms. These cannot claim
the merit of correctness, but they are works of religious genius.
At the same time, they employ all the resources of dialectic, and
have, therefore, taken quite half the journey from primary religion
to theology. But the dislocation of religious thinking, when
Christianity ceased to be a Jewish faith and found a home with
Gentiles, destroyed the continuity of Paulinism and of Jewish
thought working through St Paul. In later times, when Paulinism
revived, the epistles spoke for themselves, though they were not
always correctly understood. It should be added that, according
to A. Harnack, Hellenistic Judaism had worked out the principles
of a theology which simply passed on into the Greek-speaking
Christian Church.
Besides the teaching of Jesus (best preserved in the first
three gospels) and the teaching of Paul (in six, ten, or thirteen
epistles), the recent “science” of New Testament
theology finds other types of doctrine. The Epistle to
the Hebrews is a parallel to Paulinism, working out
Contents
of New Testament.
upon independent lines the finality of Christianity
and its superiority to the Old Testament. The Johannine
Gospel and Epistles are later than Paulinism, and presuppose
its leading or less startling positions. Whatever historical
elements may be preserved in Christ’s discourses as given in the
Fourth Gospel, these discourses fit into the author’s type of
thought better than into the synoptical framework. They have
been transformed. 1 Peter is good independent Paulinism.
The Epistle of James may breathe a Christianized Jewish
legalism, or, as others hold, it may breathe the legalism (not
untouched by Jewish influences) of popular Gentile-Christian
thought. The Johannine Apocalypse is chiefly interesting as
an apocalypse. F. C. Baur and his school interpreted it as a
manifesto of anti—Pauline Jewish Christianity; on the contrary,
it closely approaches Paul’s doctrine of the Atonement and his
Christology. Other writings are of less importance. Acts is
indeed of interest in showing us Paulinism in a later stage; the
writer wishes to reproduce his great master’s thought, but his
Paulinism is simplified and cut down. Possibly the Pastoral
Epistles show the same process. When we go outside the New
Testament, this involuntary lack of grasp becomes even more
marked.
Neither the theory of infallible inspiration, with its assertion of
absolute uniformity in the New Testament, nor Baur’s criticism,
with its assertion of irreconcilable antagonisms, is borne out by
facts. The New Testament is many-sided, but it has a predominant
spiritual unity. Only in minor details do contradictions emerge. It
is to be remembered that criticism has broken up the historical unity
of the New Testament collection and placed many of its components
side by side with writings which have never been canonized,
and which conservative writers had supposed to be distinctly
later. But in regard to date there has been a remarkable retreat
from the earlier critical assertions. And at any rate, since the New
Testament canon was set up, New Testament writings have had a
theological influence which no others can claim.
On both sides of the great transition from being a Jewish to
being a Gentile faith, Christianity, according to recent study, manifested
itself as “enthusiastic.” We may distinguish
several points in this conception. (1) Most important,
perhaps—the end of the world was held to be close at
“Enthusiasm.”
hand. “Kingdom of God” as generally used was an eschatological
concept; and, whatever difficulties there may be as to certain
gospel passa es, Christ, to say the least, cannot have disclaimed
this view. he watchword rings through all the New Testament“-
“the Lord is at hand.” A broader popular form was given to this
expectation in “Chiliasm”—the doctrine of the “Thousand”
years' reign
of Christ on earth (Rev. xx. 1-7). But even Chiliasm—which
itself has its subtler and its grosser modifications—is found
in early Gentile as well as in early Jewish Christianity. (2) 1 Corinthians
shows us a Christian community filled with disturbances,
and apparently without recognized officials. The democratic, or
rather theocratic, rights of the spiritual man were for a time relied
on to extemporize so much Church government as might be needed
till the Master returned. Yet the beginnings of Church order come
earlier than those of doctrine proper, and much earlier than the
cooling of eschatological hopes. (3) There are traces inside and
outside the New Testament of aversion to receiving back into
Church fellowship those who, after confessing Christ, had been
guilty of grave sins. The New Testament evidence is by no means
uniform (contrast Heb. vi. 4—6, x. 26-31; 1 John v. 16; with
2 Cor. ii. 7); but this high conception of Church
holiness
is attested
by a series of rigorist” heresies" during the early centuries; and
nothing could be more characteristic of eschatological enthusiasm.
Those who had fallen were not banished from hope, even by the
rigorists. Still, their case was held OVer for a higher Judge; while
the Church, especially in these more Puritian and separatist groups,
kept her garments white. (4) The enthusiastic view of the possibilities
of the Christian life—associated, as modern and especially
Western Christians must suspect, with shallow external views of
sin—lent itself to belief in sinless perfection. Even St Paul has
been supposed, not without a certain plausibility, to teach the
sinless perfection of real Christians. The West, with its theology
protesting in the background, but in vain, still sings the prayer of
the
Te Deum
: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.”
Such an enthusiastic temper does not lend itself to cool theory.
Why should theology labour at definitions? “The Lord is at
hand;” a Christian’s one wisdom is to be ready to
meet him. And yet materials for theology were richly
provided even during this period. That is true above all
Material for theology.
of the man whom we know best in New Testament days—St
Paul. Himself through and through animated with the joyful
hope, even when prepared to surrender (2 Cor. v. 8; Phil. i. 23,
ii. 17) the prospect of personal survival (1 Thess. iv. 17; 1 Cor.
xv. 51, 52) until that bright day, yet as a teacher he lays
such stress upon Christ’s first coming that the emphasis on the
second Advent may be struck out—leaving still, we might almost
claim, a complete Paulinism. He who planned his campaigns to
the great civilized centres of Corinth, Ephesus and Rome, and
thus prepared for a historic future of which he did not dream,
drew his parallels of thought with no less firm hand, and showed
himself indeed “a wise master-builder.”
In one aspect Montanism is the central reaction of the primitive
Christian enthusiasm against the forces which were transforming
its character. Of course it had other aspects and elements as well.
Hippolytus and Novatian repeat the protest less vehemently;
Donatism shows it blended with later hierarchical ideas.
But, when the enthusiasm cooled, it was Greek thought which
interpreted the contents of Christianity. The process of change
is called by Harnack sometimes “secularization” and
sometimes Hellenization. “Acute Hellenizing,” we are
told, took the form of Gnosticism. The Gnostics were
Greek influence.
the “first theologians.” When the Church in turn began to produce
a theology of her own she was imitating as Well as guarding against
those wayward spirits. What was to be the central topic? The
Church’s first creed had been “the Fatherhood of God and the
Messiahship of Jesus” (A. Ritschl); but the “Rule of Faith”
(Irenaeus; Tertullian, who uses the exact expression; Origen)—that
summary of religiously important facts which was meant to
ward off error without reliance on speculations such as the Logos
doctrine—built itself up along the lines of the baptismal formula
of Matt. xxviii. 19.
There are traces in the New Testament of a
baptismal confession simply of the name of Christ (1 Cor. i. 13, 15;
Rom. vi. 2; cf. even the late verse Acts viii. 37), not of the threefold
name. Moreover, textual criticism points to an early type of
reading in Matt. xxviii. 19 without the threefold formula. Still,
it is strange how completely this seemingly isolated passage takes
command of the development of early theology.
Out of the Rule of Faith there came in time what tradition mis-calls
the Apostles’ Creed—the Roman baptismal creed, a formulary
of great importance in all the West; then other creeds, which
also are in a sense expansions of the Rule of Faith. The Greek
mind threw itself upon the problem—who precisely is Jesus Christ
the Lord? His Messiahship is asserted; who then is
Doctrine of trinity and
of Person
of Christ.
the Messiah? and this second figure in the baptismal
confession? A provisional answer, linking Christian
theology with the philosophical theology of antiquity,
asserted Jesus Christ to be the divine Logos. But this
assertion was expanded and refined upon till two great
doctrines had been built up—«that of the Trinity of divine Persons
in the unity of the Godhead, and that of the union of two distinct
natures, divine and human, in the person of Jesus Christ. It is
curious that the Syrian church of the 4th century (
e.g.
Aphraates)
was almost unaffected by the great dogmatic debates. But there
is no hint of a reasoned rejection of Greek developments in favour
of primitive simplicity, still less of any independent theological
development. Aphraates accepts the Logos Christology, and, soon
after his time, his church is found on the beaten track of orthodoxy.
Modern Christians generally trust this development; and all
of them must admit that it seeks to answer a question arising
out of the elements of New Testament belief. There is one God;
but also there is one Lord; how are the two related? The strongest
claim that can be put forward for the doctrine of the Trinity is
that it is loyal to Christ without being disloyal to the Divine unity.
Concurrently, there was a speculative or philosophical interest;
and some prefer to defend Trinitarianism as a reconciliation of the
personality with the infinity of God. But the biblical materials
worked up in the doctrine betray little sign of any except a religious
interest. We may take it as well established that St Paul (2 Cor.
viii. 9: Phil. ii. 5-11) taught the personal pre-existence of Christ.
A. M. Fairbairn (Phil, of Christian Religion, p. 476) has argued
that Paul could not have given this teaching unless he had known
of Christ’s advancing the claim. Fairbairn barely refers to the
Fourth Gospel in this connexion, and it is doubtful whether Matt.
xi. 27 will bear such weight as he puts upon it. Of course, we
might seek to infer an unwritten tradition of Christ’s words; but
without pedantic ultra-Protestant devotion to written scripture,
one may distrust on scientific grounds the attempt to reconstruct
tradition by a process of inference. If such records as John vi. 36,
viii. 58, xvii. 3, 4 can be taken as historical, we may feel certain
that Jesus taught his pre-existence. If not, modern Christian
minds will hardly regard the doctrine as more than a speculation.
Yet we should mention another argument of some weight. There
is no trace that any Jewish Christian critics challenged St Paul’s
Christology. This may point to its being the Christology of the
whole Church. If so, who could first teach it except the one Master?
W. Bousset has suggested that the title “Son of Man” (Dan. mi.
13), used by Jesus, may have come to imply for all early Christians
personal pre-existence. W. Wrede and others have more boldly
conjectured that the Christ’s pre-existence had become an accepted
element in Jewish Messianic—it certainly occurs in one portion of
the Book of Enoch and in 4 Ezra
—and that Paul merely transferred to Jesus a doctrine which he had held while still in the Jews'
religion. “Son of God” might seem to carry us further still;
but the Old Testament makes free use of the title as a metaphorical honour, and we have no proof that any Jewish school interpreted the phrase differently.
The rival type of early theology is known as Adoptionism or
Adoptianism
q.v.
). According to it, the man Jesus was exalted
Adoption' to Messianic or divine rank. It has been argued that
the narrative of Christ’s baptism points to an Adoptionist
Christology, and that the genealogies of Jesus (through
Joseph) presuppose this type of belief, if not a still lower view of
Adoptionism.
Christ’s person. It has further been argued that the narratives
of the Virgin birth (Matthew, Luke) are an intermediate stage in
Christology. When pre-existence is clearly taught (Paul, John),
virgin birth, it is suggested, loses its importance; another theory
of Divine Sonship has established itself. This trenchant analysis is,
however, not universally admitted. Further development of doctrine
weeded out the last traces of Adoptionist belief,
though Christ’s
exaltation continued to be taught in correlation to His humiliation
(Phil. ii. 8), and became in due time a dogmatic locus in
Protestantism.
The lineaments of Greek Christian theology show themselves
more clearly in Justin Martyr than in the other Apologists, but
Justin, still more plainly in Irenaeus, who, with little speculative
power, keeps the safe middle path. Tertullian’s
Tertid- legal training as a lawyer was a curious coincidence,
if nothing more, and those legal concepts which show
themselves strongly in him have done much to mould the
Western type of Christian theology. He had great influence
on the course of Latin theology, partly through his own
writings, but still more through the spell he cast upon Cyprian.
At Alexandria, Clement and his great pupil Origen state Christianity
in terms of philosophy. Origen’s treatise, Be Principiis,
is the first and in some respects the greatest theological
system in the whole of Church history. The
Catechetical school was primarily meant for instructing adult
inquirers into Christianity. But it had attained the rank of a
Christian university; and in this treatise Origen does not
furnish milk for babes; he writes for himself and for
like-minded friends. Wildly conjectural as it may seem, his
thinking—though partly Greek and only in part biblical—is
completely fused together in his own mind. Nor does it ever
suffer from lack of thoroughness. It may be summed up in one
word as the theology of free will.
Unfaltering use is made of that conception as a key to all religious
and moral problems. Usually, apologists and divines are hampered
by the fact that, beyond a certain limited range, men cannot be
regarded as separable moral units. A new world, after death, may
be called_ in to redress the balance of the old; but anomalies remain
which faith in a future immortality does not touch. Origen called
in a second new world—that of pre-existence. All souls were tried
once, with equal privilege; all fell, save one, who steadily clave
to the Logos, and thus merited to become in due time the human
soul of Jesus Christ. No higher function could be given to free
will; unless, by an extravagance, some theologian should teach
that the Almighty Himself had merited His sovereignty by the
virtuous use of freedom. On the other hand, a shadow is cast
upon the future by Origen’s fear that incalculable free will may
again depart from God. Human birth in a grossly material body
is partly due to the pre-temporal fall of souls; here we see in Origen
the Greek, the dualist (mind and matter), the ascetic, and to some
extent the kinsman of the Gnostics. But he breaks away again
when he asserts that God ever wills to do good, and is seeking
each lost soul until He find it. Even Satan must repent and live.
10
It was not possible that this brilliant tour de force should
become the theology of Christendom. Origen contributed one
or two points to the central development of thought;
e.g.
the
Son of God is “eternally” begotten in a continuous process.
But while to Origen creation also was a continuous process, an
unspeculative orthodoxy struck out the latter point as incon-
sistent with biblical teaching; and we must grant that the
eternal generation of the Divine Son adds a more distinctive
glory to the Logos when it is no longer balanced by an eternal
creation. While the Church thus lived upon fragments of
Origen’s wisdom, lovers of the great scholar and thinker, who
had dominated his age, and reconciled many a heretic to his
own version of orthodoxy, must submit to have him branded
as a heretic in later days, when all freedom of thought was
falling under suspicion.
For a time, freedom in scholarship lingered in the younger
rival of Alexandria, the school of Antioch; though speculation
was never so strong there. Alexandria, on the other hand,
tended to be unduly speculative and allegorizing even in its
scholarship. The antagonism of the two schools governs much
of the history of doctrine; and behind it we can trace in part
the contrast between Church Platonism and what churchmen
called Aristotelianism.
Arius, a Libyan by birth, of Antioch by training (though
earlier than the greatest days of that theological school), and a
presbyter of Alexandria, represents the working of Aristotelianism.
His chief opponent, Athanasius, is probably
the greatest Christian, if Origen is the greatest thinker, among all
the Greek fathers. Few will deny that Athanasius stood for the
Christian view of the questions at issue, upon the principles
held in common by all disputants. Arius represented
a shallow if honest intellectualism. He found it
necessary to think clearly and define sharply; but Athanasius
found it necessary to believe in a divine redemption. According
to Harnack, Athanasius simplified the faith of his time by fastening
on the essential point—human immortality or “deification”
through the Incarnation of true God. Cosmic theories of the work
of a Logos subordinate to the Father fell into the background.
Ὁμοούσιος
, successfully discredited earlier as a Sabellian formula
by Paul of Samosata, was now found to be the one unambiguous
term which asserted that Christ was truly God (Council of
Nicaea.
A.D.
325) and
ὑπόστασις
(Lat.
persona
) became the technical
name for each of the Divine Three. Athanasius himself tried to
draw a distinction between affirming the Son
ὁμοούσιος
, and
calling Him
μονοούιος
. Yet it seems plain that he considered
Sabellianizing reduction of the Divine Persons to phases or modes
in the unity a lesser evil than regarding the Logos (with Arius)
as a creature, however dignified. This was made plain by the
leniency of Athanasius towards Marcellus of Ancyra. In those
days there was no word for “Person” as modern philosophy
defines it; perhaps no word would have served
the purpose of the Church if precisely so defined. The result
is, however, that a critic of doctrine sometimes questions whether
Athanasianism offers a definition of the mystery at all, or only
a set of sanctioned phrases, and a longer list of phrases which -are
proscribed as heretical. The long and dubious conflicts of opinion
concern Church history but left few traces on doctrine; Athanasius
never flinched through all the reaction against Nicaca, and his
faith ultimately conquered the Catholic Church. There is only
this to notice, that it conquered under the great Cappadocians
The Cappadocians.
(Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa), who
represented a somewhat different type of teaching.
11
The Trinity in Unity stood firm; but, instead of recognizing God as one yet in some sense three, men now began to
recognize three Divine beings, somewhat definitely distinguished in
rank each from each and yet in some sense one. Athanasius’s piety
is thus brought into association with the details of Logos speculation. The new type passed on into the West through Augustine,
and the so-called Athanasian creed, which states an
Augustine’s Trinitarianism.
Augustinian version of Greek dogma. There is indeed
one immense change. Subordinationism is blotted out,
more even than by Athanasius. On these lines modern
popular orthodoxy maintains the doctrine of the Trinity.
It seeks to prove its case by asserting first the divinity of Christ, and
secondly the personality of the Holy Spirit. The modern idea of
personality, though with doubtful fairness, helps the change.
The first great supplement of the doctrine of the Logos or
Son was the more explicit doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Macedonius,
who defended the semi-Arian or Homoiousian
position that the Spirit was merely a Divine influence—Origen
had held the Spirit to be a creature—was
branded as a heretic (Synod of Alexandria, 362; Council
Doctrine of the Spirit.
of Constantinople, 381); a strong support to Cappadocian or
modern Trinitarianism. Then, in the light of the affirmation
of Christ's full divinity, the problems of His person necessarily
received further attention. Did the Divine Logos take the
place of the higher rational soul in the humanity of Jesus?
So Apollinaris or Apollinarius of Laodicea taught, but the
Council of Constantinople (381) marked the position as heretical.
Did the two natures, human and divine, remain so separated
in Jesus as to jeopardize the unity of His person ? This was
the view which Cyril of Alexandria ascribed to Nestorius, who
hesitated to call Mary 0«ot6kos, and represented the tradition
of the Antiochene school. Such views were marked as heretical
by the Council of Ephesus (431), the decision resulting in a
profound and lasting schism. Did the two natures coalesce in
Jesus so as to constitute a single nature? This is
the Monophysite or Eutychian view, developed out
of the Alexandrian tradition (“Eutychianism is simply Cyrillianism run mad,” A. B. Bruce). The Council of Chalcedon
(451) rejected the Alexandrian extreme in its turn, guided by
Leo of Rome’s celebrated letter, and thus put the emphasis on
the duality rather than the unity in Christ's person. Another
grave and lasting schism was the result. Two great doctrinal
traditions had thus been anathematized ; the narrow line of
orthodoxy sought still to keep the middle track. Was there at
Monotheletes.
least unity of will in Jesus? No, said orthodoxy;
He had two independent faculties of will, divine and
human. The Maronites of Syria, reconciled to the see of Rome
in 1182, probably represent the Monothelete schism. John of
Enhypostasy.
Damascus’s theory of Enhypostasy (Christ's manhood
not impersonal, but made personal only through
union with His Godhead) is held by some to be the coping-stone of this great dogmatic development.
In the Trinity the problem is to combine independence and
unity; in Christology, to combine duality of nature
12
with the
unity of the person. Verbally this is done; is it
done substantially? The question, Who is Jesus
Christ? has been pushed to the very end, and authoritatively
answered in the definitions of Church orthodoxy. With these the Orthodox Greek Churches—and with their divergent decisions the various non-Orthodox Eastern
Churches, Coptic, Armenian, &c.—desire to rest satisfied;
theology has finished its work, unless in so far as it is to be
codified. It is never true while men live that thought is at a
standstill; but, as nearly as it may be true, Eastern theology
has made it so. In the West the decisions of the great councils
have been accepted as a datum. They enter into the basis of
theology; results attained by long struggles in the East are
simply presuppositions to the West; but, for the most part,
no independent interest attaches to them in the Western world.
They are taken as involved in redemption from sin—in the
Atonement, or in the sacraments. Belief in the Trinity is
almost unbroken. Western Christendom wishes to call Christ
God; even the Ritschlian school uses the wonted language in
the light of its own definitions. For others, the Trinity is the
accepted way of making that confession. It becomes of practical importance, according to S. T. Coleridge,
13
in connexion
with Redemption. It passes, therefore, as a datum of revelation. In Christology the tradition has been more frequently challenged since the Reformation.
Harnack criticizes the doctrinal development. He considers that
Christianity is best defended on the basis of the doctrine that
Christ is a man chosen and equipped for His task by God. But
in the Eastern Church the religious interest, as he thinks, points
to Monophysitism. Dyophysite orthodoxy has sterilized Eastern
Christianity, or thrown it upon inferior forms of piety. Of course
this does not mean that Harnack considers monophysitism nearer
the historic truth, or nearer the normal type of Christian thought.
On the contrary, he would hold that the scholarly tradition of
Antioch more nearly reaches the real historical manhood of Jesus.
But if it be presupposed that the purpose of Christ's mission was
to deify men by bestowing physical immortality, then we must
assume, first, Christ's essential Godhead, and, secondly, the fusion
of His divine and human natures. Whatever be the truth in the
assertion that death rather than sin is the enemy dreaded by Eastern
Christianity, and immortality rather than forgiveness the blessing
craved, it is difficult to take the talk about deification as anything
more than rhetoric. Did they not start from belief in one God?
Was not polytheism still a living enemy? It is a more obvious, if
perhaps a more vulgar, criticism of the great development to say
that it was too simply intellectual—seeking clear-cut definitions
and dogmas without measuring the resources at the command of
Christians or the urgency of their need for such things. We are
sometimes told that the councils simply denied error after error,
affirming little or nothing. But the Trinity and the Hypostatic
Union are vast speculative constructions reared upon slender
biblical data. To complain of the over-subtlety of a theological
adversary is a recognized move in the game; it may constantly
be played in good faith; it proves little or nothing. The facts
appear to be, that the Church embarked confidently on the task
of blending philosophy and religion, that the Trinity satisfied most
minds in that age as a rational (
i.e.
neo-platonic) construction,
but that in Christology the data or the methods proved less tract-
able. If two natures, divine and human, are added to each other,
what can the humanity be except one drop in the ocean of divine
power, wisdom, goodness ? The biblical authorities plainly set
forth “the man Christ Jesus,” but theological science failed to
explain how Godhead and manhood came together in unity. Fact
and theory sprang asunder; for theory had done its utmost, and
was baffled. Another admission ought to be made. Western contributions to the prolonged debate constantly tended to take the form of asserting truths of faith rather than theories. Yet what
was the whole process but a colossal theory?
14
One perplexity connected with theology is the question, How
far does Christianity succeed in embodying its essential interests
in its doctrines? The Orthodox Eastern Church
might seem to have succeeded beyond all others.
Factions of lay-folk, who quarrelled furiously over
shades of opinion never heard of in the West, and
scarcely intelligible to Western minds even if expounded, might
seem to have placed their sincerity beyond all question. And
yet there were at least two other developments which were
important in the East and proved still more so in the West
— the legal development and the sacramental. The name
" Catholic " is one which Protestant Christians may well
hesitate to resign to their rivals. Yet there is convenience and
no small significance in connecting the term with a certain
characteristic and un-Protestant type of the Christian religion.
Catholicism is not dogma only, but dogma plus law plus sacrament.
From very early days Christianity was hailed as the
“new law”; and the suppression of the rigorist sects, by
definitely giving law supremacy over enthusiasm, aggrandized
it, but at the same time aggrandized the sacraments. The
Western Christian must needs hold that the Eastern development
was incomplete. It laid these things side by side; it
did not work them into a unity. The latter task was accomplished
with no little power by the Western Church in the
period of its independent development.
15
The Greek and the
Roman Catholic Churches stand united against Protestantism
in the general theory of law and of sacraments; but a
Protestant can hardly doubt that, if Catholicism is to be
accepted, a Catholic organization, and doctrine are better
furnished by the Western Church than by the arrested
development of its rival.
The theory of asceticism had also to be more fully worked out
and better harmonized with Church authority. The priesthood
had successive rivals to face. First in the period of “enthusiasm,”
the prophets; then the martyrs and confessors; finally the ascetics.
The last, in regulated forms, are a permanent feature
of Catholicism; and the rivalries of these “regular”
Ascetic element.
clergy with their " secular" or parochial brethren continue
to make history to-day. That the ascetic life is intrinsically higher,
that not every one is called to it, that the call is imperious when
it comes, and that asceticism must be developed under Church
control—all this may be common to East and West. But, in the
utilization of the monks as the best of the Church's forces, the
Western Church far surpasses the East, where meditation rather
than practical activity is the monastic ideal. In the West, “enthusiasm,”
in the transformation under which it survives, is not
merely bridled but harnessed and set to work.
The new developments of the West could not grow directly
out of Eastern or even out of early Western conditions. They
grow out of the influence of Ambrose of Milan, but
far more of Augustine of Hippo; and behind the
latter to no small degree there is the greater influence
of St Paul. Intellectual developments do not go straight
Augustine’s influence.
onward; there are sharp and sudden reactions. Pelagianism,
the rival and contradiction of Augustinianism, represents a mode
of thought which appeared early in Christianity and which could
count upon sympathizers both in East and in West. But,
when the Christian world was faced with the clear-cut questions,
Was this, then, how it conceived man's relation to God? and
Did it mean this by merit? Augustine without much difficulty
secured the answer " No." In the East (Council of Ephesus,
431) he was helped by the entanglement of Pelagianism with
Nestorianism, just as in the West the ruin of Nestorian prospects
was occasioned partly by dislike for the better known system
of Pelagianism. In Augustine's own case, reaction against
Pelagianism was not needed in order to make his position clear.
He may have left a vulnerable frontier in his earlier dealings
with the same thorny problem of free will. Certainly his
polemic as a Christian against the Manichaeism of his youth
constitutes a curious preface to his vehement rejection of
Pelagian libertarianism. Once again, a narrow track of
orthodoxy midway between the obvious landmarks! But
Augustine had a deeply religious nature, and passed through
deep personal experiences; these things above all gave him
his power. He was also genius and scholar and churchman,
transmitting uncriticized the dogmas of Athanasianism and
the philosophy of ancient Greece, according to his understanding
of them. Without forgetting that Augustine was partly a
symptom and only in part a cause—without committing ourselves
to the one-sidedness of the great-man method of construing
history—we must do justice to his supreme greatness.
If earlier times lived upon fragments of Origen, the generations
of the West since Augustine have largely lived upon fragments
of his thought and experience. On the other hand, not even
the authority of. Paul and of Augustine has been able to keep
alive the belief in unconditional predestination. If in the West
Athanasianism is a datum, but unexamined, and not valued
for its own sake, Augustinianism is a bold interpretation of,
the essential piety of the West, but an interpretation which not
even piety can long endure—morally burdensome if religiously
impressive. The clock is wound up at the great crises of history,
but proceeds to run down, and does so even more rapidly in
Protestantism than in Catholicism. It may be held by hostile
critics that the whole thing is a delusion. More sympathetic
judgments will divine unquenchable vitality in a faith whose
very paradoxes rise up in new power again and again. Augustine's
(erroneous) interpretation of the Millennium (Rev. xx.),
as a parable of the Church's historic triumph, stands for the final
eradication of primitive “enthusiasm” in the great Church,
though of course millenarianism has had many revivals in
special circles.
Even if the Augustinian stream is the main current of Western
piety, there are feeders and also side-currents. Ambrose, Augustine,
Jerome, Gregory the Great are known as the four Latin Fathers.
Jerome is very great as a scholar, and Pope Gregory as an administrator.
As a writer, too, Gregory modifies Augustinian beliefs into
forms which make them more available for Church teaching—a
Ethical rationalism and mysticism.
process very characteristic of Western Catholicism and carried still
further in later centuries (notably by Peter Lombard). Perhaps
two side-currents of piety should be named. There is an
ethical rationalism which can never be wholly suppressed
in the Christian Church by the Pauline or Augustinian
soteriology. One thinks one sees traces of it, though
held down by other influences, in the whole of medieval
theology, and notably in Abelard. It disengages itself
in the 17th century as Socinianism and in the 18th as Rationalism
or Deism. Secondly there is a strong side-current in the mystical
tradition, which we may perhaps treat as the modified form under
which the philosophical theology of the Greek Church maintained
its life in the medieval West. If so, Mysticism includes in itself
a prophecy of modern Christian Platonism or idealism, with its
cry of “Back to Alexandria.”
A Western echo of the Christological controversies of the East
is found in the Adoptianism of Spain 785–818). These Adoptianists
do not hold that Christ the person is adopted (He is God by birth),
but his
human nature
may be.
16
There might be need of this,
indeed, if the Adoptianists' theory of redemption were to stand,
according to which Christ had taken to Himself a sinful human
nature, and had washed it clean. This extreme assertion of duality
as against Christological unity was naturally marked as heretical.
Great advance is made in organizing Catholic theology by
the fuller theory of sacraments. The East had a tentative
hesitating doctrine of transubstantiation;
17
the West
defines it with absolute precision (cf. Paschasius
Radbertus against Ratramnus; the fourth Lateran Council,
1215). But if the medieval Church and modern Catholics
regard the Eucharist as the principal sacrament, Protestants
can hardly keep from assigning the supreme place, in the
medieval system, to the sacrament of penance. If early
" enthusiasm " conceived the Christian as almost entirely free
from acts of sin, and if Protestant Paulinism conceives the child
of God as justified by faith once for all, the full Catholic theory,
representing one development of Augustinianism, views the
Christian as an invalid, perpetually dependent on the good offices
of the Church. The number of sacraments is fixed at seven,
18
first by Peter Lombard, and the essence of the three sacraments
which do not allow of repetition—baptism, confirmation, orders—is
defined as a “character”
19
imprinted on the soul and never capable of being lost. We must mark the advance in formal
completeness. Theology is now not merely the dogma of the
Divine nature or of Christ's person; it is also a dogmatic
theory of how the Christian salvation is conveyed through
sacraments to sinful men. On the other hand, a theology
which is mainly sacramental is overtaken pretty soon by
dumbness. It is of the essence of a sacrament to be an
inscrutable process.
Theories of legal merit, amount of debt, supererogatory good-
ness, and ascetic claim—representing the aspect of Catholicism
as law—are more and more worked out. The occasion of the
formal separation of East and West—the Western doctrine of
the twofold " procession " of the Holy Spirit, incorporated in
the (so-called Nicene) creed itself (“filioque”)—is of little or no
real theological importance. The schism was due to race rivalries,
and to dislike for the ever-growing claims of the see of Rome.
An important contribution to doctrine is contained in the
Cur Deus Homo of Anselm of Canterbury. The doctrine of
Atonement, destined to be the focus of Protestant
evangelicalism, has remained undefined in Catholic
circles,
20
an implicate or presupposition, but no part
of the explicit and authorized creeds. When treated in the
early centuries, it was frequently explained by saying that
Christ's sufferings bought off the devil's claim to sinful man, and
some of the greatest theologians (
e.g.
Gregory of Nyssa) added
that the devil was finely outwitted—attracted by the bait of
Christ's humanity, but caught by the hidden hook of His
divinity. Anselm holds that it was best for the injured honour
of God to receive from a substitute what the sinner was personally in no condition to offer. Whatever other elements
and suggestions are present, the atmosphere of the medieval
world, and its sense of personal claims, are unmistakable. With
Anselm Ritschl takes Abelard, who explains the Atonement
simply by God's love, and thus is the forerunner of " moral "
or " subjective " modern theories as Anselm is of the " objective " or " forensic " theory. It must be admitted, however,
that there is less definiteness of outline in Abelard than in
Anselm. He does not even deal with the doctrine as a specialist,
in a monograph, but only as an exegete.
Contemporaneously with the new and vivid intellectual life of
an Anselm or an Abelard, the “freezing up” of traditionalism is
evidenced by the preparation of volumes of Sentences from Scripture
and the Fathers. One of the earliest of such collections
is that of
Isadore
q.v.
) of Seville (560–636), who, from this
and other writings, ranks among the few channels which
conveyed ancient learning to the middle ages. His
Sentences
are
selected almost (though not quite) exclusively from Augustine and
Gregory the Great. Direct influence from the Greek Fathers upon
the West is vanishing as the Greek language is forgotten. The
great outburst of Sentences at a later time has been referred to
the consternation produced by Abelard's
Sic et Non
. The modern
reader can hardly banish the impression that Abelard writes in a
spirit of sheer mischief. Probably it would be truer to say that
he riots in the pleasures of discussion, and in setting tasks to other
irresponsible and ingenious spirits. He does not fear to contrast
authority with authority, upon each point in succession; the
harder the task, the greater the achievement when harmony is
reached! In regard to Scripture alone does he maintain that
seeming error or discrepancy must be due to our misinterpretation. If throughout the middle ages Scripture is treated as the ultimate authority in doctrine, yet Abelard seems to stand alone in
definitely contrasting Scripture with later authorities. Moderns will
question the possibility of asserting Bible infallibility a priori;
but it is more really startling and noteworthy that Abelard should
preserve a living sense of fallibility outside the Bible.
There are many great collections of Sentences, notably by Hugh
of St Victor and Peter Lombard. The last-named—though with
more continuity of texture than Isidore—quotes largely from the
Bible and the Latin Fathers. If Abelard stands for the intel-
lectual daring of scholasticism, Lombard represents its other pole
— interest in piety, i.e. in the Church. He is almost timidly
cautious. He does not open up difficulties like Abelard, but
smoothes them over. This suits the coming age. The great
writers of the early centuries were to tell on men s minds not in
the breadth of their treatment but in a theological pemmican.
And the characteristic task for living theologians was to consist
in writing commentaries on the Lombard's Sentences; for a time
these Sentences themselves had been suspected, but they gained
immense influence.
Had this been all, Western theology might have sunk into a
purely Chinese devotion to ancient classics. But the medieval
world had not one authority but two. Thin and
turbid, the stream of classical tradition had flowed
on through Cassiodorus or Boetius or Isidore; through
these, at second-hand, it made itself known and did its work.
Guarantees of progress.
Arabian study of Aristotle.
But before the great outburst of scholasticism, ancient literature
found a somewhat less inadequate channel in Arabian and
partly even in Jewish scholarship. Aristotle was no
longer strained through the meshes of Boetius;
and the new light inspired Roscellinus with heresy.
True, we must not exaggerate this influence. There was
no genuine renaissance of civilization, such as marked the
dawn of modern history. The medieval world did not copy
the free scientific spirit of Aristotle; it made him, so far as
known, a sort of philosophical Bible side by side with the theo-
logical Bible. But it was a very great matter to have two
authorities rather than one. And if any man was to be put in
the preposterous position of a secular Bible, no writer was fitter
for it than Aristotle. The middle ages did their best in this
grouping; only here and there a rare spirit like Roger Bacon
did something more, something altogether superior to his age,
in showing that the faculty of independent scientific inquiry
was not quite extinct. It is possible to exaggerate the influence
of the revived knowledge of Aristotle; but, so far as one can
trace causes in the mysterious intellectual life of mankind,
that influence gave scholasticism its vigour. (See
Arabian Philosophy
Scholasticism
.)
With the new knowledge and impulse, there came a new method.
Alexander of Hales is the first to adopt it, in place of the “rhetorical”
method of previous theologians. Everything is
now matter of debate and argument. The
Sentences
had resolved theology into a string of headings; with
scholasticism each topic dissolves into a string of arguments for
and against. These arguments are made up of “rationes” and
“auctoritates,” philosophical authorities and theological autho-
rities. They are as litigious as a lawsuit—without any summing
up; the end comes in a moment with a text of Scripture or an
utterance by one of the great Fathers. Once such a dictum has
been cited, the rest of the discussion is treated as by-play and
goes for nothing. “I am a transmitter,” Confucius is reported
to have said. The great schoolmen were transmitters—putting in
order, stating clearly and consecutively, conclusions reached by
wiser and holier men in earlier times. Are the systems self-consistent?
Their guarantee is the tireless criticism carried on by
rival systems. No parallel display of debating acuteness has ever
been seen in the world's history. It is easy to underrate the
schoolmen. Indolence in every age escapes difficulties by shirking
them, but the schoolmen's activity raised innumerable awkward
questions. On the other hand, they possessed to perfection the
means of making their speech evasive. If there are hollow places
in the doctrinal foundations of the Church, it will be a tacit understanding
among the schoolmen that such questions are not to be
pressed. Above all, one must not look to a schoolman to speak
“a piercing and a reconciling word.” There is no revision of the
premises in debate from a higher or even from a detached and
independent point of view. The premises from which he may
select are fixed; many of the conclusions to be reached are also
fixed. He speaks, most cleverly, to his brief, but he will not go
outside it. He may argue as he likes so long as he respects the
Church's decisions and reaches her conclusions.
The systems of the leading schoolmen must rank above their
commentaries upon the Lombard's Sentences, as the greatest of
all systems of theology. Especially is that honour due to St
Thomas Aquinas's larger
Summa Theologiae
21
We may
well believe that he
Aquinas.
represents scholastic divinity at its
best. He is not an Augustine, still less perhaps an Aristotle, but
he is the Aristotle and the Augustine of his age, the normal thinker
of the present and the lawgiver of the future. He teaches the
medieval Platonic realism, but he accepts the Aristotelian philosophy of his day, marking off certain truths as proved and understood by the light of nature, and stamping those which are not so
proved as not understood nor understandable, i.e. as " mysteries,"
in the sense in which the term has come to be used by ages that
have inherited Aquinas's thoughts. He has Augustine s Predestinarianism, stiffened (according to Loofs) by Arab philosophical determinism, and he has much of Augustine's doctrine of the grace
of God, though it is flanked with doctrines of human merit which
might have astonished Augustine. The seven sacraments of course
have their place in the body of the system, and are exhaustively
studied. When we turn to Duns Scotus, we still find realism, still
Duns Scotus.
predestinarianism. And yet these are rivals. An attempt has been made by R. Seeberg to interpret Duns
as the forerunner of
Luther
in his emphasis on the practical. Expert knowledge and judicial insight must decide the
point; but, so far as the present writer can judge, it is illusory
to imagine that Duns points us beyond the medieval assumptions.
As generally understood, Duns makes caprice supreme in God.
The arbitrary divine will makes right right and wrong wrong.
Here, says Ritschl, the involuntary logic of predestinarianism
speaks its last word. Though he may technically be classed as an
"extreme realist," Duns is the forerunner of those later Nominalists, like William of Occam, who unsettled every intellectual
ground of belief in order that they might resettle belief upon Church
authority, not reason but rather scepticism being for them the
ancilla domini
. Later authoritative pronouncements on the part
of the Roman Catholic Church favour Thomism and disown the
Occamites; though the keen hostile criticism of Harnack affirms
that the Church had need of both systems—of Thomism, to champion
its cause in the arena of thought, and of the Nominalist theology
to aggrandize the Church as the ruling power in practice.
When Protestantism arose, there was urgent need of reform.
All sides granted that at the time, and all grant it now. Separation
Origins of Protestantism.
was not contemplated by any one at the first;
this again is manifest. Yet it is also matter of plain
history that Protestantism is more than a removal
of abuses, or even than a removal carried out with reckless
disregard of consequences. It is partly an outcome of Luther's
personality—of his violence, no doubt, but also of his great
qualities. It is due mainly to the dominant tradition in Church
doctrine. Augustinianism reacted against attempts to tone it
down in theory or neutralize it in practice, until at last it broke
loose in the form of Protestantism. But Protestantism is
largely due further to the Renaissance. The new knowledge
enabled men to read the Bible, like all other ancient books,
with a fresh mind. Finally, we have the true central cause
in the Pauline doctrine of faith. Evaded by Augustinianism,
it came back now, with some at least of its difficulties and
paradoxes, but also with its immense attractive and dynamic
power. When the Reformers went beyond Augustine to Paul,
Protestantism was born.
22
Even the Counter-Reformation, so far as it was a matter of doctrine (Council of Trent, 1545—63)>
took the form of reaffirming a cautious version of Augustinianism.
Whether Protestantism found its adequate doctrinal expression
is very doubtful. Luther was no systematic thinker;
Melanchthon
Melanchthon.
the theologian of the Lutheran Church, gave his system
the loose form of
Loci communes
, and went back more
and more in successive editions to the traditional lines of doctrinal theory—a course which could not be followed, without
bringing back much of the older substance along with the familiar
forms of thought. To find the distinctive technicalities of Lutheranism we have to leave Melanchthon's system (and his great
Reformation creed, the
Augsburg Confession
) for the
Formula of Concord
and the lesser men of that later period. In Calvin, indeed,
Calvin.
the Reformed
23
theology possessed a master of system.
We notice in him resolute Predestinarianism—as in
Luther, and at first in Melanchthon too; the vehicle of revived
Augustinian piety—and resolute depotentiation of sacraments, with
their definite reduction to two (admittedly the two chief sacraments) — baptism and the Lord's Supper.
24
In affirming the "inamissibility" of grace in the
regenerate
(not simply in the unknowable
elect
) Calvin went beyond Augustine, perhaps beyond Paul,
certainly beyond the Epistle to the Hebrews, resolutely loyal to the
logic of his non-sacramental theory of grace. Yet, in contrast with
the doctrine usually ascribed to Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin teaches
that grace does come through sacraments; but then, nothing comes
beyond the fruits of faith; from which grace all salvation springs
necessarily. To use technical language, Calvinism holds that
sacraments are needful
ex ratione praecepti
, (merely) "because
commanded." In contrast with this, orthodox Lutheranism has
to teach baptismal regeneration and consubstantiation, as well as
justification by faith. It is hard to see how the positions harmonize.
Zwingli
and
Calvin
, developing a hint of
Hus
, introduce a distinction between the visible and the invisible Church which Melanchthon
repudiates but later Lutheranism adopts. The Articles of the
Church of England (19, 26) speak of the visible Church, but unless
by inference do not assert a Church invisible. Upon most points
Anglicanism seeks for a
via media
of its own. Resolutely Protestant in early days and even Calvinistic, it yielded to the suggestions of its episcopal constitution
25
and sacramental liturgies; and now its theologies range from Calvinism at one extreme to
outspoken hatred of Protestantism at the other. Historically, great
issues have hung upon the dislike by which High Lutheranism and
High Anglicanism, those two midway fortresses between Rome and
Geneva, have been estranged from each other.
It is thus plain that the stream of Protestantism was very
early split up into separate channels. Did any of these theologies
do justice to the great master thought of grace given to faith?
Antecedently to their separation from each other the Reformers
took over the theology of Greek orthodoxy as a whole. Complaints against that theology may be quoted from early writings
of every Reformer, even Calvin. They knew well that the
centre of gravity in their own belief lay elsewhere than in the
elaborately detailed scheme of relations within the Godhead
or in the Theanthropic person. But ultimately they persuaded
themselves to accept these definitions as normal and biblical,
and as presuppositions of Christ's saving work. The decision
had immense results, both for religion and for theology. Nor
Continued unity in Protestant doctrines.
did the unity of Protestant theology — Lutheran and
Calvinist — confine itself to the period before the great
divergence. Men of the second or third generation — often called the "Protestant Scholastics" — work
together upon two characteristic doctrines which the fathers
of Protestantism left vague. The Reformation doctrine of
Atonement, while akin to Anselm's, differs in making God the
guardian of a system of public law rather than of His private
or personal honour. This conception came to be more fully
defined. Christ's twofold obedience, (
) active and (
passive, produces jointly a twofold result, (1) satisfaction to
the broken moral law, (2) merit, securing eternal life to Christ's
people.
26
There is no such full and careful theory of Atonement
in any Catholic theology, and, according to so unbiassed a
judge as A. Ritschl, it represents the last word in doctrine along
the lines laid down by the Reformers. Could Catholics adopt
it? Hardly; for the Protestant assertion of Christ's merit is
shadowed, if any doctrine of merit in the Christian is brought
in. Yet the very word reminds us of the legal piety which
is characteristic of Western popular religion through all its
history. We now find "merit" confined to Christ, and the
usual application ruled out, somewhat as St Paul's intenser use
of Pharisee conceptions destroyed instead of confirming the
idea of righteousness by works. But it is by no means clear
that this Protestant doctrine of Atonement is a unity. "Merit"
is an intruder in that region of more strict and majestic law;
yet Christ's "merit" is the only form under which the positive
contents and promises of the Christian Gospel are there represented. Even the most resolute modern orthodoxy usually
tries to modify this doctrine. There is a break with the past,
which no revival or reaction can quite conceal.
Again, the Reformation had drawn a line round the canon—sharply in Calvinism, less sharply in Lutheranism (which also gave a
quasi
normative position to its Confessions of Faith). Anglicanism once more resembles Lutheranism with differences;
it enjoins public reading of certain lessons from the Apocrypha
and uses in worship even the " Athanasian " as well as the two
more ancient creeds. On the basis of belief in inspiration we
find, during the days of Protestant scholasticism, the most
reckless and insane assertions of scriptural perfection. Even
in our own time, popular Protestant evangelicalism joins with
the newer emphasis upon conversion the two great early Pro-
testant appeals — to Atonement and to infallible Scripture. But
the Protestant Church is by no means alone in making such
assertions. Other Churches make them too, though they over-
lay and disguise them with appeals to tradition and to the
authority of the Church itself, or the Fathers. The definite
and limited burden had to be more definitely dealt with; hence
these Protestant extravagances.
The first great rival to Protestant orthodoxy, apart from
its old enemy of Rome, was Socinianism, guided by Laelius
Socinian- Socinus (?.».), but still more by his nephew Faustus.
ism. Thoroughly intellectualist, and rational, and super-
naturalist, it has no one to champion it to-day, yet its influence
is everywhere. Jesus, a teacher who sealed His testimony
with His blood, and, raised from the dead, was exalted or
adopted to divine glory, thus giving to men for the first time
the certainty that God's favour could be won and eternal life
enjoyed — such is the scheme. There is no natural theology; the
teachings so described are really part, or rather are the essence,
of the revelation of Jesus. Atonement is a dream, and an
immoral dream. Supernatural sacraments of course drop out.
The Lord's Supper is a simple memorial. Baptism were better
disused, though Faustus will leave the matter to each Christian
man's discretion. There is not in all Church history any state-
ment of doctrine better knit together. Socinus's church is a
school — a school of enlightenment. He was also — like Calvin,
if on more narrowly common-sense lines — an admirable exegete.
Harnack ranks his system with Tridentine and post-Tridentine
theology on the one hand, and with Protestantism on the other
hand, as the third great outcome of the history of dogma.
Nevertheless the judgment of history declares that this brilliant
exploit was entirely eccentric, and could only in indirect ways
subserve theological study. Those to-day who are nearest the
Socini in belief are as far as any from their fashion of approach-
ing and justifying their chosen version of Christian doctrine.
Even after the loss of the Protestants and the suppression
or expulsion of the Jansenists, the doctrinal history of the
Later bis- Church of Rome is described as governed by discus-
tory of sions in regard to Thomist Augustinianism. The
Roman Molinists {i.e. followers of Louis Molina the Jesuit,
doctrine. not Michael Molinos the mystic) are the leading
representatives of a different theology. Harnack, a
keenly hostile critic, draws attention to a change in the region
of moral theology, not dogmatics. After long controversy, St
Alfonso Liguori's doctrine of Probabilism (originated by Molina)
definitely triumphed everywhere. Conduct is considered lawful
if any good Church authority holds it to be defensible; and
" probability " warrants the confessor in taking a lenient view
of sins which he himself, and authorities of weight in the
Church, may regard as black in the extreme. From Harnack's
point of view, the theory destroys Augustinianism, whatever
honour may still be paid to that name. Another important
change in Roman Catholic theology has been the increasing
personal power of the pope. This was significantly foreshadowed
when Pius IV. put forward by his own act what is known as the
creed of the Council of Trent; and, after the coldness of the
18th century and the evil days of the French Revolution, an
Ultramontane revival, relying with enthusiasm on the papacy,
grew more and more strong until it became all-powerful under
Pius IX. It gained a notable victory when that pope, acting
on his own authority, defined (1854) as of faith a doctrine which
had been long and hotly discussed — the Immaculate or abso-
lutely sinless Conception (deeper than mere sinlessness in act
and life) of the Blessed Virgin. The second and decisive
victory followed at the Vatican Council (1870), which, at the
cost of a small secession of distinguished men, declared the
pope personally infallible (see Infallibility) and irreformable
as often as he rules ex cathedra points of faith or morals. This
once again seems to be the last word in a long development.
Uncertainty as to the authorities determining religious belief —
Scripture, tradition, Fathers, Doctors — is now, at least poten-
tially, at an end; the pope can rule every point definitely, if
he sees good to do so.
The theory of Development (J. A. Mohler, J. H. Newman), which
throws so new a light upon the meaning of tradition, is a valuable
support of the conception of a sovereign pontiff drawing
out dogmas from implicit into explicit life. Still, new M°dern
and obscure questionings may still arise. When is the ,,j 0ry .
pope ruling faith and morals from his throne? When aev «'°P m
may the Church be assured that the infallible guidance menu
is being given? A startling fresh development is suggested by
Harnack, while vehemently dismissed as impossible by another
Protestant scholar, H. M. Gwatkin. May a reforming or inno-
vating pope arise? He would find, in theory at least, that he
possessed a weapon of matchless power and precision. But
hitherto Roman Catholic theology has refused to conceive of any
development except by enlargement of the Church's creed. Much
may be added to formulated belief ; it is not admitted that any-
thing has been or can be withdrawn. Brilliant Modernist scholars
like A. Loisy may have successors who will champion theories
of evolutionary transformation. But at the present hour a repre-
sentative writer names as a typical open question in his communion
the Assumption of the Virgin. Perhaps, indeed, it is rather a
dogma hastening towards definition. Is the theory or tradition
correct, that, after death and burial, Mary was bodily received
into heaven and her grave left empty? Such problems engage
the official theologians of the Church of Rome.
It is natural that the " variations " with which Bossuet re-
proached the Protestants should demand more space. The
Christological problem seems to require separate
treatment. In regard to the Trinity, Protestantism tant his-
has nothing very new to say, though " Sabellianism " toryot
is revived by Swedenborg and Schleiermacher. But doctrlaes '
in regard to Christology opinion takes fresh forms as early as
Luther himself. While this became conspicuous in connexion
with his doctrine of consubstantiation in the Eucharist, it appears
27
that he had a genuine speculative interest in the matter. Communicatio idiomatum was well known in the schools as an
affair of terminology. You might say correctly that God has
died (meaning the Godman), or that a man is to be worshipped
— Christ Jesus. According to Luther, however, it is not merely
in words that the attributes of the Godhead qualify Christ's
human nature.
28
That takes place in fact; and so the human
glorified body of Christ is, or may become under conditions
which please Him, e.g. at the Eucharist, ubiquitous. This new
quasi-monophysitism disinclined the Lutherans to make much
of Christ's humanity, while the Reformed, partly from the
scholarly tradition of Calvin, partly from a polemical motive,
laid great emphasis on the manhood. A. Ritschl* even speaks
of the Reformed as teaching Kenosis in the modern sense; but
it is to be feared they rather taught alternately the manhood
and the Godhead than made a serious effort to show the com-
patibility of divine and human predicates in one person.
Christ as man was one of the Elect (and their head) ; He needed
grace; He depended upon the Holy Spirit. On the other hand,
as God, He was the very source of grace. The Lutherans held
that the Incarnate One possessed all divine attributes, but
either willed to suspend their use — this is the Kenosis doctrine
of the Lutheran school of Tubingen in the 17th century — or
concealed their working; the latter was the doctrine of the
Giessen school.
A theory which flickers through Church history in the train of mystical influence proceeding from the pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita has become more prominent in modern.
29
Neces times — that Christ would have become Incarnate stty" of even had man not sinned. Rejected by Thomas, it incarna is patronized by Duns — not, one thinks, that he loved t,0 rational certainties more, but that he loved redemptive necessities
less. In a sense this theory puts the coping-stone upon Christological
development. If we arc warranted in regarding the
Second Person of the Godhead as in very deed “Himself vouchsafing
to be made,” that great Becoming cannot well be suspended
upon a contingency which might or might not arise; and
theologians in general regard the sin of man as such a contingent
event. Incarnation almost demands to be speculatively interpreted
as the necessary last stage in the self-manifestation
and self-imparting of God. Yet interest in man's moral necessities
threatens to be lost amid this cosmological wisdom.
Theology pushed too far may overleap itself. Those who
shrink from the old confident assertion, “Christ would not
have become incarnate but for man's sin,” might claim to say,
from reverence and not from evasiveness, ignoramus. On the
other hand, the type of thought which would perfect Christianity
in the form of a philosophy, and subordinates Atonement to
Incarnation, is pledged to this doctrine that Incarnation was a
rational necessity. Such speculative views are associated with
the revival of another traditional piece of mysticism—the Holy
Spirit the
Copula
or bond of union in the Godhead. There is
no such assertion anywhere in the New Testament.
For modern German theories of
Kenosis
among Lutheran and
Reformed, see A. B. Bruce's
Humiliation of Christ
. Basing on the
language of Phil. ii. 7, they teach, in different forms,
that the son of God became a man under human limitations
at conception or birth, and resumed divine predicates
at His exaltation. It might be put in this way—a
really Divine personality, a really human experience. Strong as
are the terms of Phil. ii. 7, we can hardly suppose that St Paul
had a metaphysical theory of Christ's person in view. In Great
Britain and America many have adopted this theory. It is often
taught,
e.g.
that Christ's statements on Old Testament literature
are to be interpreted in the light of the Kenosis. The enemies of
the theory insist that, while it safeguards the unity of Christ's
personal experience at any one point, it breaks up by absolute
gulfs the continuity of experience and destroys the identity of the
person. Indeed, those forms of the theory, which give us a Logos
in heaven (John iii. 13) along with the humbled or Incarnate Christ
on earth,, seem to fail of unifying experience even at the single
point. Other suggestions in explanation of the mystery have been :
a gradual Incarnation, the process not being complete
until Christ's exaltation (I. A. Dorner's earlier view);
impersonal pre-existence of the Logos, who became
personal—compare and contrast Marcellus of Ancyra—at
the Incarnation (W. Beyschlag's earlier view, practically adopted by Dorner in his later days); Jesus the
man who was absolutely filled with the consciousness of God
(Schleiermacher) ; Jesus not to be defined in terms of " nature,"
either human or divine, but as the perfect fulfiller of God's absolute
purpose (A. Ritschl's view, practically adopted in later days by
Beyschlag). The orthodoxy which refuses all new theories may
look for help to the pathological dissociation of personality, or
at least (
e.g.
J. O. Dykes in
Expository Times
, Jan. 1906; Sanday
Christologies Ancient and Modern) to the mystery of the subconscious.
We have now to look at Protestant theology in its dealing
with questions in which it is more immediately or more fully
interested. In the early period known as the Protestant
scholasticism there was no desire for progress in doctrine.
Challenged by Arminianism in Holland, the Calvinistic
theology replied in the Confession of Dort ; at which
Synod English delegates were present. This creed may almost
rank with the Lutheran
Formula of Concord
as summing
up post-Reformation Protestant orthodoxy. But the direct
fate of Arminian teachers or churches was no measure of their
influence. One proof of the latter is found in Archbishop Laud
and the English High Churchmen of his school, who throw off
the Augustinian or Calvinistic yoke in favour of an Arminian
theology. Lutheranism had set the example of this change.
Later editions of Melanchthon’s
Loci Communes
, generously
protected by Luther, drop out or tone down Luther’s favourite
doctrine of predestination. The Augustinian clock was running
down, as usual. In the 18th century “Illumination”—an age
which piqued itself upon its “enlightenment,” and
which did a good deal to drive away obscurity, though
at the cost of losing depth—Deism outside the churches
is matched by a spirit of cool common-sense within them, a
spirit which is not confined to professed Rationalists. Civil
wars and theological wranglings had wearied men. Supposed
universal truths and natural certainties were in fashion. The
plainest legacy of the 18th century to later times has been a
humaner spirit in theology. Christian teachers during the
19th century grew more reticent in regard to future punishment.
The doctrine when taught is frequently softened;
sometimes universalism is taught. A movement towards
Unitarianism.
Arianism and then towards Socinianism (Joseph
Priestley, Nath. Lardner, W. E. Channing) among English
Presbyterians and American Congregationalists left permanent
results in the shape of new non-subscribing churches and a
diffusion of Unitarian theology (J. Martineau). The 18th
century is very differently interpreted in different quarters.
Orthodox evangelicalism is tempted to view it as an apostasy
or an aberration. On the other hand, not merely agnostics
like Leslie Stephen but Christian theologians of the Left like
Ernst Troeltsch regard it as the time when supernaturalism
began decisively to go to pieces, and the “modern” spirit to
assert its authority even over religion. A. Ritschl, again,
claims that neglected elements of Christianity were striving for
utterance, particularly a serious belief in God as Father and in
His providential care. It was not, says Ritschl, a turning away
from Christian motives, but a turning towards neglected Christian
motives. This view seems logically to involve Ritschl's belief,
that it is not the light of reason but the revelation of Christ which
warrants the assertion of God's fatherly providential goodness.
Whether temporary or permanent, a great reaction from the
18th-century spirit set in. It was partly on Augustinian lines,
partly on the lines of what the Germans call Pietism.
Under John and Charles Wesley, a system known as
Evangelical Arminianism was worked out in 18th-century
England, strongly Augustinian in its doctrines of sin and
The Evangelical revival.
atonement, modern Augustinian in its doctrine of conversion,
strongly anti-Augustinian in its rejection of absolute predestination.
Within the Anglican Church, however, the new revival
was Augustinian and Calvinistic, till it gave place to a
Church revival, the echo or the sister of the Ultramontane
movement in the Church of Rome. The
vigorous practical life of the modern school of High
The Oxford Movement.
Church Anglicanism, initiated by John Keble, W. Hurrell
Froude, J. H. Newman, E. B. Pusey, is associated with a
theological appeal to the tradition of the early centuries, and
with a strongly medieval emphasis upon sacramental grace. In
Germany, dislike of the Prussian policy of “Union”—the
legal fusion of the Lutheran and Reformed
Churches—gave life to a High Lutheran reaction
Lutheran opposition
to the “Union”.
which has shown some vigour in thought and some
asperity in judgment (E. W. Hengstenberg;
H. A. C.
Haevernick;
dogmatic in G. Thomasius and F. A. Philippi ; more
liberal type in
C. F. A.
Kahnis; history of doctrine in
G. Thomasius) . The most distinguished of the theologians classed
as “mediating” are C. Ullmann, C. I. Nitzsch and Julius
Muller. Later evangelicalism in the English-speaking lands
gives up belief in predestination, or at least, with very few
exceptions, holds it less strongly. That change is clearly a
characteristic feature of 19th-century theology.
Many of the movements just mentioned are, at least in
design, pure reactions involving no new thoughts. Apart from
apologetics or single doctrines like that of the Atonement,
the task of rethinking Christian theology upon to
the great scale has been left chiefly to German science,
philosophical and historical. If the task is to be accomplished,
Proposals to unify theology.
then, whatever merit in detail belongs to wise and
learned writers already referred to, it would seem that some
one central principle must become dominant. This consideration, as far as an outsider can judge, excludes any formal Roman Catholic co-operation in the suggested task. So long as theological truth is divided into the two compartments of natural or rational theology and incomprehensible' revealed mysteries,
there is no possibility of carrying through a unity of principle. Again, many Protestants rule themselves out of participation in the search for unified doctrine. It is a modern
commonplace—Loofs dates the formula from about 1825—that
Protestantism has two principles: a “formal principle,” the
authority of Scripture, and a "material principle," the doctrine
of justification by faith. We have already indicated that some
such pair of principles was prominent when historic Protestantism
pulled itself together for defence during its scholastic
age. But surely serious thought cannot acquiesce in a dual
control. While the double authority continues or is believed
to continue in power, there seems no hope of making theology
a living unity, which will claim respect from the modern age.
One great attempt at unifying Christian theology came from
the side of philosophy. Kant s scheme, which in religious theory
as well as in chronology may be regarded as a link
between the 18th and loth centuries, led on to the
very different scheme of Hegel; and the latter system
began almost at once to influence Church doctrine.
Influence of Hegelianism.
D. F. Strauss
q.v.
) applied it with explosive effect to the study
of the life of Jesus. F. C. Baur, assisted by abk colleagues, if
hardly less revolutionary, was much more in touch [with theology
than Strauss had been. The Hegelian threefold rhythm was to
run through all history, especially for Baur through the history
of the Christian Church and of its doctrine. Baur maintained a
thorough-going evolutionary optimism. “The real was the
rational” from first to last. However biassed, this a priori study
had its merits. It unified history with a mighty sweep, and
revealed through all the ages one evolving process. But we have
still to ask whether the doctrines it made prominent are really
those which are vital to the Christian Church. And we have to
look into Baur’s esoteric interpretation of the doctrinal development.
For him, as for Strauss, the unity of God and man is the
central truth, of which Christ’s atoning death is a sort of pictorial
symbol. This implies that the whole of Western theology has been
an aberration or an exoteric veiling of the truth.
30
In Dogmatic
the school is represented by A. E. Biedermann, and with variations
by O. Pfleiderer. A more orthodox reading of Hegel’s thought,
which brings it into line with some Christological developments
already described, is found in J. E. Erdmann and the theologians P. K.
Marheineke and Karl Daub. Influences from Hegel are
Influence in England.
also to be traced in Richard Rothe, I. A. Dorner, A. M.
Fairbairn ; and through the mediation of British philosophers Hegelianism has widely affected British theology.
The orthodox wing of idealists take as their watchword Incarnation;
Christianity is “the religion of the Incarnation” (sub-title
of
Lux Mundi
; see B. F. Westcott,
passim
). The rationalist
wing resolve Incarnation and still more Atonement into symbols of
philosophical truth. Of the two parties, the latter appears the more
successful in accomplishing the task of unifying theology, although
at the cost of subordinating both theology and religion to philosophy.
The strength of all the idealists consists in their appeal to reason.
Schleiermacher set himself to explain what is
distinctive
in
religion. He distinguishes religion from philosophy as feeling in
contrast with thought; but when he has done that
Reden über die Religion
, 1799) he has little to add.
Any type of highly wrought feeling may make a man
religious, whether it be theistic or pantheistic ; indeed, as a child
Schleier-macher.
of Romanticism, Schleiermacher puts a peculiarly high estimate
upon the pantheistic type. What else can we expect from a thinker
who is interested simply in feeling as feeling? When he wrote
his
Glaubenslehre
(1821) Schleiermacher had become much more
of a Christian churchman. “Christianity is one of the teleological
pieties,” and has as its peculiarity that “in it everything is referred
to the redemption accomplished through Jesus of Nazareth.” But
it is doubtful whether the elements of his final synthesis really
interpenetrate. He tells us (
Kurze Darstellung des theologischen
Studiums
, 1811) that the theologian, while himself loyal to his
Church, must expound, as a historian, the beliefs actually held in
the branch of the Church which he represents. Oil and water do
not mix. Do the unchecked individual enthusiasm of the
Reden
and the loyalty to established beliefs required in the later
writings, combine to form a living theology? It is little wonder
if Schleiermacher attains a compromise rather than a unity. He
has been one of the great ferments in modern Protestant doctrine
both of the Right and of the Left. Alex. Schweizer
31
maintained
his general positions more nearly than any other. But there is
no Schleiermacher school. W. Herrmann, from his own point of
view, has quoted J. C. K. Hofmann and F. R. Frank as making
important modifications and sometimes corrections of the lines
laid down by Schleiermacher, while J. S. Candlish, representing
a moderate Scottish Calvinism, was half inclined to welcome the
reduced form of Schleiermacher’s basis found in H. L. Martensen
(a Dane), J. T. Beck, and the Dutchman, J. J. van Oosterzee,
i.e.
Scripture the true source of doctrine, but the religious consciousness its ordering principle.
A bolder and more original attempt to restate Protestantism
as a systematic unity is found in the work of A. Ritschl, with
H. Schultz and W. Herrmann as independent allies and
colleagues, and with J. Kaftan, A. Harnack and many
others as younger representatives on divergent lines. Reaction
against the philosophy of Hegel and the criticism of Baur is common
Ritschl.
to all the school, though Ritschl went further back than the younger
men towards critical tradition and further in some points towards
orthodox dogma. Positively, the school build upon foundations
laid in ethics by Kant and in philosophy of religion by Schleiermacher;
so also R. A. Lipsius, and yet his dogmatic results coincide
more nearly with Biedermann’s or Pfleiderer’s than with the
“intermediate though not mediating” position taken up by the
Ritschlians. Not even the acceptance of forgiveness as the central
religious blessing is exclusively Ritschlian, still, it is a challenge
alike to the 18th century, to the Church of Rome and to the modern
mind. Ritschl and his friends forfeit that unifying of life and duty
which is gained by making the moral or perhaps rather legal point
of view supreme. As they deny the natural religion of the 18th
century—the religion which works its way into harmony with
God by virtue—so, still more emphatically, they refuse to bid the
sinner merit forgiveness. Thus they constitute one more revival
of Paulinism or Augustinianism, though with qualifications.
Their effort is to expound Christianity, not from the point of
view of philosophy like the Hegelians, nor from that of an abstract
conception of religion, tempered by regard for historical precedents,
like Schleiermacher, but from its own, from the Christian point of
view. Ritschl has several dogmatic peculiarities, intenser in him
than in his fellow-workers and followers. A notable instance is
his doctrine of the Church—the community (Gemeinde); the sole
object of God’s electing love, according to Ritschl’s interpretation
of St Paul. Hence theology is not to be the utterance of individual
Christianity merely, but of the Church’s faith, embodied in its
classical literature, the New Testament, and (subordinately) in the
Old. The finality of the New Testament is partly due to its
being the work of minds—including St Paul—who knew the Old
Testament from the inside', and did not misconstrue its religious
terminology as Greek converts almost inevitably did (cf. Harnack
or E. Hatch). Upon the Church, Ritschl, who very much disliked
and distrusted mysticism, poured out the same wealth of emotion
which the Christian mystic pours out upon his dimly visualized
God or Christ. Again, Ritschl divides all theology into two compartments,
morality and religion; service of men in the Kingdom
of God, direct relation to God in the Church by faith. Though he
later declared that “Kingdom of God” was the paramount category
of Christian thought, it does not appear that he substantially recast
his theology. Here then his strong desire for unity is cut across by
his own action. There may well be room for relative distinctions
in any system of thought, however coherent ; but it looks as if
Ritschl’s distinction hardened into absolute dualism.
Again Ritschl modifies the doctrine of sin. Like Schleiermacher
he substitutes collective guilt for original sin; and he attaches
great dogmatic value to the assertion that sin has two stages —
ignorance, in which it is pardonable, and obduracy, when it is ripe
for final sentence (probably annihilation). Here then Ritschl
swerves from Paulinism; it is in other Scriptures
32
that he finds
his guarantees for the position just stated. The result is to eliminate
everything remedial from the Christian gospel. Yet Ritschl
claims that his doctrine of Christ as Head of the Church combines
the lines of thought found separately in Anselm and Abelard,
while Schleiermacher is said to have been one-sidedly Abelardian.
Ritschl denies natural theology
33
as well as natural religion, denies
dogma outright in its Greek forms—Trinitarian and Christological ;
and seeks to transpose the doctrine of Atonement—Christ’s Person
“or” Works as he puts it—from the legal to the ethical. The Pauline
touch shows itself plainly here. Justification by faith is a “synthetic” judgment — the sinner is righteous; it is not an “analytic” judgment—the believer is righteous. God “justifieth the ungodly.” Sacraments are a republication of the “Word” of the Gospel; we have to content ourselves with this rather evasive
formula, so often employed by the Reformers.
The highly academic Ritschlian movement has had wide practical
influence in many lands. Here English and American thought
strikes in sympathetically, offering moral theories of Atonement,
though not looking so exclusively towards forgiveness. Horace
Bushnell’s last theory declared that in forgiving sin God “borecost,”
as even a good man must do. John M‘Leod Campbell—with
a strong desire for unity in thought, “the simplicity that is in
Christ”—caught most attention by the suggestion of a vicarious
repentance in Jesus Christ. With R. C. Moberly this becomes an
assertion that Christ has initiated a redemptive process of self-humiliation, which we can prolong in ourselves by the help of sacraments if we choose; while W. Porcher du Bose (like E. Irving
early in the 19th century) holds the Adoptianist theory styled by
A. B. Bruce “redemption by sample”—the divine Christ has
assumed a tainted human nature and washed it clean, thus making
it a promise and potency of the world’s redemption.
Even if we accept the programme of reconstructing theology
from a single point of view, we may desire to criticize not
merely Ritschl’s execution of the scheme, but his selection of
the ruling principle. Is it enough to extricate the spirit of
Protestantism from the imperfect letter of its early creeds?
One set of difficulties is raised by the progress of
Theology and science.
science. No Protestant can deny that it is a duty for
Christianity to come to terms with scientific discoveries,
and few Catholics will care to deny it. Anxious
negotiations thus arise, which colour all modern schemes of
theology. But with a certain school they become central and
dominant. We distinguish this position from the new emphasis
on Christology, whether churchly or radical. Those who find
a gospel in philosophy arc ready to dictate terms to outsiders;
but those who wait upon science for its verdicts supplicate
terms of peace. Just as much of Christianity is to survive as
science will spare. Often the theologians in question look to,
psychology as the permanent basis of religion; who is to deny
that religion is a psychological fact, and the natural expression
of something in man’s constitution? This strain may be
recognized, mingled with others, in Schleiermacher; it has
found interesting expression in the contributions of H. J.
Holtzmann and Ernst Troeltsch to the volume dealing with
Christianity in
Die Kultur der Gegenwart
. Christ is confessed
as the greatest figure of the past, and as one of no small importance
still for the present and future. But, with entire,
decision, Christianity is called to the bar of modern culture.
From that tribunal there is to be no appeal, whether to a higher
revelation or to a deeper experience. This view stands in
connexion with the study of comparative religion. Out of that ,
very Ritschl school, which began by despising all religions
except those of the Bible, has developed the
religionsgeschichtlich
movement, which dissolves Christianity in the wider stream.
Such a policy is at the opposite pole to Ritschl’s; he desired
to interpret Christianity in the light of its own central thought.
If Christians can find in their faith new resources to meet the
new needs, they may hope to command the future. Theology
if it is to live must be henceforth at once more Christian and
more scientific than it has ever yet been.
A less threatening yet important possibility of modification
arises out of the scientific study of the New Testament.
Augustine, Luther, the evangelical revival, went back
to St Paul; can Christianity not dig deeper by going
back to Jesus? A Protestant has to view the past
history of doctrine very much as a succession of declensions
Theology and New Testament scholarship.
and revivals, the latter more than counteracting
the former. He does not claim to have regained
the inspiration of a Paul; but he holds that Augustine was more
Christian than the sub-apostolic age, and Luther more Christian
than Augustine. That is the hopeful feature in the past. The
task for the present, with its unequalled scientific resources, is
to get nearer than ever to the heart of the Gospel. Must Pauline
categories always be supreme? The Ritschl school, and others
too, have made an earnest effort to incorporate Christ’s words
in Dogmatic and no longer shunt them into systems of
“Christian Ethics.” They have not idolized Paulinism; but
have they not idolized Luther? They seem to take for granted
that the spirit—though not the letter—of that great man was a
definitive statement of the Christian principle. To interpret
Christianity out of itself is one thing; to interpret it out of
Luther, even out of a distillate of Luther, is possibly a lower
thing. The theology of the future may draw more equally
from several New Testament types of doctrines. The scheme
that includes most may be the successful scheme. Unity may
be safeguarded in the confession of Christ, and theology indeed
prove “Christocentric.”
34
Above all, the social message of
Jesus may well prove a gospel to our materially prosperous
but inwardly sorrowful age. Any school of thought which
despises that hope has small right to call itself Christian.
Casting a backward glance once more over the evolution
of Christian theology, we may say very roughly that at first
it recognized as natural or rational truth the being
of the Logos, and as special fact of revelation the
Incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ. In medieval
times the basis was altered. What had been rational
Natural and Revealed—the Logos.
truth now claimed acceptance as supernatural mystery.
Modern idealists, ill at ease with this inheritance, try to show
that Christ’s Incarnation no less than His eternal divine being
is a natural and rational truth. But, when this programme is
carried out, there is no small danger lest the relations traced
out between God and men should collapse into dust, the facts
of Christ transform themselves into symbols, and the idealistic
theology of the right wheel to the left.
Again, Western theology, very roughly summarized, while
accepting the earlier doctrinal tradition, has broken new ground
for itself, in affirming as rational necessity that God
must punish sin (this is at least latent in Aquinas’s
doctrine of natural law), but as contingent fact of revelation
that God has in Christ combined the punishment of sin
The Atonement.
with the salvation of sinners; this is the Reformation or post-Reformation
thought. Here again the desire makes itself felt
to impute more to God’s nature. Is His mercy not as inherent
as His justice? If so,
must
He not redeem? For, if He
merely may redeem but must punish, then His greatest deeds
on our behalf wear an aspect of caprice, or suggest unknown
if not unknowable motives. The doctrine of penal substitution
in the Atonement, as usually conceived, seems to point in the
same direction as predestinarianism. Behind superficial manifestations
of grace there is a dark background, almost like the
Greek Fate. The ultimate source of God’s actions is something
either unintelligible or unrevealed. Christian theology cannot
acquiesce in this. In our day especially it must seek to light
up every doctrine with the genuine Christian belief in God’s
Fatherhood. And yet here again incautious advance may
seem to overleap itself. If it should come to be held that with
so kind a God no redemption at all is necessary, the significance
of Christ is immensely curtailed if not blotted out. Even if
He should still be taken as the prophet of the divine goodwill,
yet the loss of any serious estimate of sin makes good nature
on God’s part a matter of course. Christianity of such a type
is likely to be feeble and precarious. Perhaps we may find a
third and better possibility by ceasing to aim at a scientific
gnosis of God, either limited or unlimited. Perhaps what
concerns the Christian is rather the assured revelation that God
is acting in character, like Himself, and yet acting wonderfully
by methods which we could not predict but must adore. The
free life of personal beings is no more to be mastered by a
formula than it is to be assigned to caprice. A God who is
love will act neither from wilfulness nor from what is called
rational but might more correctly be called physical necessity.
He will act in and from character. Always wise, always holy,
always unsearchable,, the Christian’s God is that heavenly
Father who has His full image and revelation in Jesus Christ.
While the greatest of all theological systems, the
Summae
of the middle ages, include everything in the one treatise, it
has been the business of post-Reformation learning
to effect a formal improvement by distributing theological
studies among a definite number of headings.
The new theory lived and grew throughout the 18th-century
Modern divisions of theology.
Age of Enlightenment (
e.g.
J. S. Semler), linking Protestant
scholasticism with modern thought, and exhibiting
the continuity of science in spite of great revolutionary changes
and great reactions. The beginning is ascribed to A. Hyperius
(Gerhard of Ypres), a professor at Marburg, and, it seems, a
conciliatory Lutheran, not, as sometimes said, a Reformed
(1511–64). He published
Four Books on the Study of Theology
(1556). Book iv. is said to be the first appearance of
Practical Theology—Liturgies, Pastoral Theology, &c. In
virtue of another work (
De Formandis Concionibus
, 1553),
Hypcrius has been further termed the father of Homiletics.
L. Danaeus (Daneau), a French Protestant, has the merit of
publishing for the first time on
Christian Ethics
(1577). It
has been supposed that the Reformed divinity here set itself
to remedy the dogmatic dryness of Protestant scholasticism,
fifty years before the Lutheran G. Calixtus moved in the matter
Theol. Moralis
, 1634). Too much has been made of this.
Danaeus hardly represents at all what moderns mean by
Christian ethics. He does not contrast the Christian outlook
upon ethics with all others, but dwells chiefly upon the super-eminence
of the Ten Commandments as a summary of duty.
Other distinctions are named after an interval of two centuries.
J. T. Gabler, for the first time "with clearness" (R. Flint),
wrote in 1787
De Justo Discrimine Theologiae Biblicae et
Dogmaticae
. Biblical Theology is a historical statement of the
different Bible teachings, not a dogmatic statement of what
the writer holds for truth, qua truth. Again, P. K. Marheineke
is named as the first writer (1810) on Symbolics, the comparative
study of creeds and confessions of faith. In 1764 the
introductory study of theology as a whole, which Hyperius
invented, had been given by S. Mursinna the name it has since
usually borne—“Theological Encyclopaedia.” Most of such
Encyclopaedias have been “material,”
i.e.
connected treatises,
giving a brief outline of theology as a whole; not, of course,
alphabetic indexes or dictionaries. The most famous of all,
however—Schleiermacher’s
Kurze Darstellung des theologischen
Studiums (1st ed. 1811)—belongs to the class of “formal”
encyclopaedias. It states how theology should be divided,
but does not profess to give a bird’s-eye view of results.
Schleiermacher’s treatise is highly individual. Theology is
viewed as essentially a branch of church administration. True,
in the theologian properly so called the scientific interest is
strong; where the religious or practical interest is stronger, you
get church rulers or administrators in a narrower sense. Still,
even to the theologian the practical interest in church welfare is
vital. Theology loses its savour when studied in a spirit of merely
scientific curiosity; and it does not concern the lay Christian.
In spite of what may be deemed eccentric in this standpoint,
Schleiermacher’s summary is full of interest. He divides as
follows:—I. Philosophical Theology: A. Apologetics; B. Polemics.
II. Historical Theology: A. Exegetical—including the determination
of the canon; B. Church History proper; C. The depicting
of the present state of the Church; (1) its faith—Dogmatics; the
belief of one branch of the Church; (2) its outward condition—Statistics;
these should be universal. Symbolics is to be a branch
of statistics. Biblical " Dogmatics " also is said to be nearer this
than it is to Dogmatics proper. III. Practical Theology: A. the
service of the (local) church; Homiletics, Liturgies, &c. ; B. the
Government of the (national or international) Church; questions
of relation to the State, &c. The reader will note Schleiermacher’s
peculiar way of dealing with Dogmatic as the belief of the Church
— an unprecedented view, according to A. Ritschl—and his requiring
that belief to be reported qua historical fact.
It is singular that Schleiermacher on the whole sums up in the
Kurze Darstellung against the separation of Christian Ethics from
Dogmatics. But he grants that much may be said on both sides
of that question, and in his own Glaubenslehre he follows ordinary
usage and as far as possible banishes Ethics to a
Christliche Sittenlehre
a book which has caused him to be regarded by Protestants
as the founder of modern Christian Ethics. There are therefore
three parallel studies, on all of which Schleiermacher published—Dogmatic
or
Glaubenslehre
, Christian Ethics, Philosophical Ethics.
Curiously enough, it is from Schleiermacher’s philosophical
ethics that a threefold division—the Chief Good, Virtues, and
Duty or the Law—passed into almost all text-books of Christian
Ethics, till recently a rebellion rose against it on the
ground of redundancy and overlapping. Books on Christian
Ethics have also found room for a
quasi
Synoptic doctrine of
the Kingdom of God, which Paulinized dogmatic systems were
slow to admit. It should also be noted that Schleiermacher’s
place for Apologetics is by no means undisputed. Many dislike
the subject; some would thrust it into practical theology.
Again, the new study of the religions of the world is seeking its
place in the curriculum of Christian theology, just as it is seeking—in
some way—to modify Christian thought. The recognized
place, the assured results, have not yet been attained.
Further details must be sought in text-books. But it may
be affirmed that Dogmatic must remain the vital centre; and
so far we may soften Flint’s censure of the British
thoughtlessness which has called that study by the
name “systematic theology.” Systems of ethics and
apologetics are welcome to the theologian; “encyclopaedia”
Some conclusions.
is a new and broader-based “systematic theology” in itself;
but none of these is central as Dogmatic is. One may also
venture to declare that Dogmatic rests upon philosophical and
historical studies, and exists for practical uses. Thus a triple
or fourfold division of theological sciences seems natural.
Lastly, it must be confessed that at the beginning of the
20th century there is more life or health in history than in
philosophy, and much more in either than in dogmatic theology.
Sub-divisions of Dogmatic, whether well chosen or ill, throw
light upon theology as developed in the past. The six usual
Protestant headings are as follows: Theology proper, Anthropology,
Christology (C. Hodge here inserts Hamartiology),
Soteriology, Ecclesiology (omitted by C. Hodge), Eschatology.
The Lombard’s
Sentences
deal in bk. i. with God; bk. ii. the
creatures; bk. iii. Incarnation, Redemption, Virtues; bk. iv:
Sacraments and Last Things. Aquinas’s
Summa
has no such
clear lines of division.
The Church carried forward from the middle ages a tradition
of “Moral Theology”
35
answering to Christian Ethics, alongside
of Dogmatics or of all-inclusive Summae. Casuistry (with
parallels in early Protestantism like Jeremy Taylor’s
Ductor
Dubitantium
), growing out of the Confessional, is characteristic
of this Roman Catholic Ethic; yet the study is not restricted
to the technical equipment of confessors. The Roman
Catholic contributors to the volume on Christianity in
Die
Kultur der Gegenwart
write on:—I. Dogmatic: A. Apologetic
or General Dogmatic; B. Special Dogmatic or Dogmatic proper.
II. Moral Theology. III. Practical Theology. The Protestant
contributors, representing somewhat varied standpoints in
German religion, follow much the same plan. Apologetic has
no separate place with them; but the
system
of theology (in a
sense midway between the dogmatists and the encyclopedists),
is allotted between Dogmatics, Christian Ethics and Practical
Theology.
Literature
.—A bibliography of theology cannot name every
important book. The effort is made here (1) to mention writers
of great originality and distinction, (2) writers of special importance
to some one Christian confession, (3) without needless repetition of
what has already been said, (4) dogmatic treatises being preferred
but not to the exclusion of everything else.
Origen is great in scholarship as well as in system. Athanasius’s
On the Incarnation of the Eternal Word
represents his central thoughts
not less interestingly because it is earlier than the Arian controversy.
Cyril of Jerusalem’s
Catechetical Lectures
are a statement
of doctrine for popular use, but arranged as a complete system.
Gregory of Nyssa’s
Great Catechesis
is an instruction to catechists
how they should proceed—though of course stating the writer’s
theology and apologetic, with his belief in universal salvation.
Theodoret has an outline of theology in the last book (v.) of his
treatise
Against Heresies
. Theodore of Mopsuestia is a more suspected representative of the same scholarship—that of Antioch;
John Chrysostom is the orator of the school. Cyril of Alexandria
represents the later Alexandrian theology. With John of Damascus
the progress of Greek divinity ends. A good modern statement is in
Chr. Androntsos’s
Δογματική
). In the West, Augustine is the chief agent
in breaking new ground for theology. The
Enchiridion ad Laurentium
is a slight but interesting sketch of a system, while the De Doctrina
Christiana is another lesson in the imparting of Christian instruction,
as is also, naturally, the
De Catechizandis Rudibus
. The
City of God
and the
Confessions
are of unmatched importance in their several
ways; and nothing of Augustine’s was without influence. Gregory
the Great’s
Magna Moralia
should also be named.
In the middle ages Isidore (at its gateway), then Peter Lombard,
then Aquinas (and his rivals), are pre-eminent for system, Anselm
and Abelard for originality, Bernard of Clairvaux as the theologian
who represents medieval piety at its purest and in its most characteristic
forms, while Thomas à Kempis’s devotional masterpiece,
On the Imitation of Christ
, with Tauler’s
Sermons
and the
Theologia
Germanica
, belong to the world’s classics. All the Protestant reformers are of theological importance—Luther, Melanchthon and
Calvin, then Zwingli, then John Knox and others. The reply to Protestantism is represented by Cardinal Bellarmine, Petavius (less directly), Moehler.
Speculative theology was represented in the Roman Catholic Church of the 19th century by the Italian writers A. Rosmini, V. Gioberti, T. Mamiani della Rovere. Roman Catholic learning has always taken a high place (the Bollandists; the Benedictines; the huge collections of Migne). Of the Church's ample devotional literature St Francis of Sales and F. W. Faber are favourable specimens. A modern
Dogmatic
is by Syl. T. Hunter, S.J.
Anglican theology is little inclined to dogmatics. We have such unsystematic systems as Bishop Pearson's Exposition of the Apostles' Creed—a book of the golden age of great writers—or we have average 19th-century Church orthodoxy in Bishop H. Browne,
On the XXXIX. Articles
. Anglicanism prefers to philosophize institutions (R. Hooker,
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
), or states ancient learning (R. Cudworth; the Cambridge Platonists), or else polemical learning—Bishop Bull (against Petavius's innovating views of history), D. Waterland (against S. Clarke), S. Horsley (against J. Priestley), J. B. Lightfoot (very strong as an apologist in scholarship; not strong in pure thinking); the polemic becomes altogether conciliatory in those other glories of 19th-century Cambridge, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort. Or Anglican theology deals with historical points of detail, such as fill the Journal of Theol. Studies. In devotional literature Anglicanism has always been rich (
e.g.
Jeremy Taylor, Archbishop R. Leighton, L. Andrewes, W. Law, J. H. Newman). Bishop Butler stands by himself in lonely greatness.
English Puritanism lives in the affections of modern readers more than the Protestant schoolmen of the Continent do—Richard Baxter, John Owen, John Howe, Thos. Goodwin,. John Goodwin (an early Arminian); for learning, John Lightfoot; for genius, John Milton; for literary and devotional power, John Bunyan—always admirable except when he talks Puritan dogma. Essential Puritanism is prolonged in the 19th century by R. W. Dale (
The Atonement; Christian Doctrine
). The Scottish leader, T. Chalmers (
Lectures on Divinity
), is more important as an orator or as a man than as a thinker. The somewhat earlier lectures of G. Hill are dry.
Arminianism is less fully worked out by Arminius than by later Dutch divines, of whom the " conciliatory " Limborch is sometimes used as a Methodist text-book. The theologian of English Methodism, apart from John Wesley himself, is Richard Watson. W. B. Pope's
Compendium
is a somewhat more modern version.
Jonathan Edwards, a very stern Calvinist, is one of the few first-rate geniuses America has to boast in theology. C. Hodge, A. A. Hodge, W. G. T. Shedd, published Calvinistic systems. Horace Bushnell had great influence.
While the production of systems of
Dogmatic
(and of
Christian Ethics
) never ceases in Germany, A. Ritschl was content to rely on his treatise upon
Justification and Reconciliation
(vol. i. History of the Doctrine; ii. Biblical material; iii. Positive construction—but much intermingled with history; good English translations of i. and iii.). His
Unterricht in der Christlichen Religion
is poor as a school-book but useful for reference. Something is to be learned regarding Ritschl himself from his very hostile
Hist. of Pietism
. The earlier
Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche
(2nd ed. 1857) is a landmark in
Apologetics and Church history
. J. Kaftan's
Dogmatic
should be named, also the
Modern Positive Theology
of Th. Kaftan and others.
H. L. Martensen's
Dogmatics
restates substantial orthodoxy with fine literary taste. His
Christian Ethics
, though diffuse, is perhaps the finest piece of Protestant theology under that title. His friend, I. A. Dorner, had a powerful mind but an inferior gift of style.
The student of theology will do well to seek in the best histories of doctrine more detached treatment than Dogmatic can give. F. Loofs mentions W. Munscher, J. A. W. Neander, F. C. Baur, G. Thomasius, F. Nitzsch, A. Harnaek, as showing steady advance. Add Loofs himself and R. Seeberg. Works in English by W. G. T. Shedd, G. P. Fisher, J. F. Bethune Baker. Church formularies in Winer (Confessions of Christendom), Schaff (
Creeds of Christendom
), F. Loofs (
Symbolik
).
The Symbolik
of J A. Moehler is a very able anti-Protestant polemic.
A German reviewer has associated as English contributions to Dogmatics, A. M. Fairbairn's
Christin Modern Theology
, A. B. Bruce's
Apologetics
, and the present writer's
Essay towards a New Theology
. Two American books represent modern evangelicalism—W. N. Clarke's very successful
Outline of Theology
, and W. A. Brown's
Christian Theology in Outline
. The High Church position is given in the
Manual
of T. B. Strong, Evangelical Anglicanism in H. G. C. Moule's
Outline
Encyclopaedia may be studied in J. F. Rabiger, translated with additions by J. Macpherson. J. Drummond (Unitarian) and A. Cave (Congregationalist) have written
Introductions to Theology
, Cave's bibliographies are not free from errors. American contributions in P. Schaff's Propaedeutic and J. F. Hurst's
Literature of Theology
; a
Classified Bibliography
. Recent German work by C. F. G. Heinrici; for older treatment see C. R. Hagenbach.
R. Ma
Philosophische Monatshefte
(1888), Heft 1 and 2. See also
Theism
Other usages of
θεολογία
are the Divine nature of Christ (St
John Chrysostom, quoted in Konstantinides’ Greek Lexicon), Old
and New Testaments (Theodoret,
ib
.) ; Greek theology and Mosaic
or revealed theology (Theodoret).
F. Nitzsch in Herzog-Plitt,
Realencyk
. (1877). Fuller details regarding Abelard’s writings in the same author’s art. in Herzog-Hauck (1896).
So Ritschl, following Schleiermacher,
Der Christliche Glaube
, § 30.
A. W. Benn (
History of English Rationalism in the 19th Cent
.)
goes beyond ordinary usage in defining rationalism as a militant
theory opposed to all belief in God.
Four hundred
years is another significant figure in the Jewish
book, 4 Ezra.
If Harnack is right in regarding a New Testament canon as
one of the “Apostolical authorities” which the Church brought
into the field against Gnosticism, we see the truth on historical
grounds of the position taught on dogmatic grounds by R. Rainy
Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine
)—scriptural faith
not the starting-point but the goal of theological development.
The starting-point is rather the “Rule of Faith.”
The passages referred to have sometimes, but with no great
probability, been regarded as Christian infiltrations.
Adoptionism is one species of Monarchianism. The other
species, Modalism, has its most important type historically in
Sabellianism. And the name Sabellianism is often loosely applied
e.g.
to Swedenborgianism) to any modalistic Monarchianism
(Christ one phase of God. Not three persons in the Godhead, but
a threefold revelation of a God strictly one in person).
Harnack takes a different view of Origen; the certainty of ultimate salvation overbears free will with a sort of physical necessity. He also thinks that in Origen’s esoteric doctrine the historical Christ becomes unimportant. That is a severe judgment.
Harnack and F. Loofs describe them as belonging to the Homoiousian party—believers in the Son’s “likeness of essence”
to the Father’s, not “identity of essence.” Bethune Baker vehemently
denies that these great leaders were contented with
Homoiousianism. Anyway, we must remember that radical theology
had gone to much greater extremes in denial (Anomaeans—the Son
unlike the Father). It was not by any means exclusively the
“battle of a diphthong.”
Spanish Adoptianism breaks up the unity almost without
disguise.
Cf.
Aids to Reflection
, Aphorism 2, Comment.
A. M. Fairbairn takes the rather unusual view that Greek
Christian theology was the climax of the process of Greek
philosophy
, and so far alien to piety, although he is far from banishing speculation out of theology.
Christ in Modern Theol
., pp. 81, 90, 183.
Loofs declares that the very conception of a means of grace is medieval.
The term Adoptianism arose at this time. Modern theologians
carry it back to much earlier views.
Until indeed, in modern times, Greek theology accepted the
Western term and definition.
This, too, has been adopted in modern Greek theology.
Augustine already has this conception (Loofs). A hostile critic
might say that the conception affirms the absolute worth of sacraments while absolutely declining to say what they accomplish.
Even the Council of Trent defined what Protestants had
challenged—nothing else.
The
Summa contra Gentiles
has a more polemic or apologetic
interest than the dogmatic
Summa
, but deals almost equally with
the contents of Christian theology as a whole. Books i.–iii. are
said to deal with what is later known as natural theology, and
Book iv. with what is later known as dogmatic. But Aquinas
appeals to the Bible as an authority all through. That is not the
procedure of modern natural theology.
Roman Catholic scholars naturally hold that Paul was misconstrued, but they cannot deny that Protestant theology was directly a version and interpretation of Paulinism.
The more radical Protestantism of the non-Lutheran orthodox
churches is called in a technical sense "Reformed." German
scholarship generally ranks the Church of England with the "Reformed" churches because of its Articles.
Lutheranism seeks to add, in a sense, a third sacrament,
Penance (so even Melanchthon).
Few Lutheran churches possess bishops. In Germany the "episcopal system" is a right claimed on behalf of the civil
government.
This is not fully formulated even in the Lutheran Formula of
Concord, nor yet in the Calvinistic canons of Dort and Confession
of Westminster, though these and other Protestant creeds have
various instalments of the finished doctrine. One might add a
still further distinction of the Protestant scholasticism. The
Atonement imparts to the believer (
) forgiveness, (
) positive
acceptance. Actual renewal is, of course, something beyond either
of these.
According to I. A. Dorner.
The human predicates are not held to modify the Divine
nature, except by modern Kenoticists, who therefore, when they
are Lutherans, claim to be completing Luther's theory.
Rechtfertigung u. Versohnung, i. p. 384.
Hence R. B. Haldane, in the Scottish Church lawsuit of 1904,
is found telling the House of Lords that Justin Martyr had a grasp
of speculative truth which was impossible to St Augustine.
Or the Dutchman, J. H. Scholten.
Unless 1 Tim. i. 13 ; but is that epistle Paul’s?
The doctrine of “value judgments” which he substitutes for
Schleiermacher’s appeal to feeling, belongs to philosophy of religion
and is thus analogous to natural theology.
1 Thomasius and H. B. Smith are quoted as holding the “Christocentric”
ideal. A. M. Fairbairn, mindful of the vast importance of
the conception of God, amends the programme. Theology is to be
formally Christocentric, materially Theocentric (Fatherhood of God).
“Mystical Theology” is described in Addis and Arnold’s
Catholic Dictionary as a “branch” of Moral Theology.
Retrieved from "
Category
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica articles about religion
Hidden categories:
Subpages
Pages with override contributor
Headers applying DefaultSort key
Pages using smallrefs with font-size
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Theology
Add topic