1. The (radical) Enlightenment (Spinoza, Reimarus, Hume, and Kant) had a very negative view of revealed religion in general, and Christianity in particular.

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REL 2011

MIDTERM EXAM

FALL 2016

Answer three (3) questions in essay form. Each essay should be at least two (2) pages in length, double-spaced, 12 pt. font. The total length of the exam should be 6-8 pages. To answer these questions it is necessary that you have done the readings I list after each question (Pals, Nigosian, Livingston). The essays should be submitted as one submission (not three separate submissions) to Turnitin assignments in Blackboard, no later than MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7TH, 2016, BEFORE 11:30 P.M.

IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ANSWER SOME OF THESE QUESTIONS UNLESS YOU COME TO CLASS.

1. The (radical) Enlightenment (Spinoza, Reimarus, Hume, and Kant) had a very negative view of revealed religion in general, and Christianity in particular. For example, Reimarus looked at Christianity as a fraud, a fabrication of the power-hungry early disciples of Jesus. Kant had a complete disregard for revealed religion (which he found full of superstitions and gross immoralities) and sought translate Christianity into a moral system, which we can get on our own through Reason (not revelation). Hume proposed a naturalistic explanation of religion and attacked all attempts to rationally prove the existence of God. Although Schleiermacher and Hegel were influenced by the Enlightenment in their critique of revelation and dogma, and were both influenced by Kant and Spinoza, they had a different analysis and interpretation of religion. 1. State the (radical) Enlightenment understanding of religion and compare it and contrast it with that of Schleiermacher and Hegel. 2. In what ways the way Schleiermacher, and Hegel see religion a more positive and sympathetic interpretation of religion and Christianity? 3. Or are the views of religion offered by Schleiermacher and Hegel in the end more harmful to Christianity in particular, and religion in general (e.g. by making too many concessions to scientific naturalism and the Enlightenment)? (For this essay Handout #1 is essential, and my lectures on the Enlightenment, Schleiermacher, Hegel; the Strauss selection posted on Blackboard will give you a pretty good idea of Hegel’s position.)

2. Emile Durkheim offered a major interpretation of religion that rivaled Tylor’s and Frazer’s in depth and in many ways surpassed them in influence. 1. Explain’s Durkheim’s interpretation and analysis of religion. 2. Explain how Durkheim’s analysis is similar to Marx’s (and Feuerbach’s), and ways in which it is different. 3. Is Durkheim’s analysis of religion continuous (in sync) with the Enlightenment (Hume, Reimarus, and Feuerbach), or does it significantly go beyond the Enlightenment? (For this question you must read carefully the chapter on Durkheim and Marx in Pals, as well my lectures on Marx, Feuerbach, and Strauss. I have posted a selection from Feuerbach).

3. Discuss Marx’s thesis, building on the work of Feuerbach and Hegel (as Hegel was interpreted by Feuerbach) that religion is a major obstacle to the emancipation of humanity from superstition and oppression, that religion has been a major force in legitimizing and justifying the conquest of subjugation of peoples in the name of their god and religion. QUESTION: a. Is Marx’s critique of religion for the most part correct, partially correct, or too simplistic (black and white) to be right? b. In what ways, as Nietzsche claimed, can it be argued that Marxism a “Christian heresy.” (You must read the Marx selection in Pals, and I strongly recommend that you read the Feuerbach selection posted on Blackboard as well; my lectures on Hebrew prophecy will be most useful for answering at least part of this question)

4. The Bhagavad Gita is one of the greatest syntheses in the history of religions. The Gita reconciles the different paths to salvation (Karma/Action, Jñana/Knowledge, and Bhakti/Devotion or faith in God) offered, respectively, by the Vedas (action in the world), the Upanishads (knowledge of Brahman or the Absolute), and the Gita (devotion or faith in a personal, loving and savior God who takes on human form to make his message available to us humans). Without a doubt, it represents either one of the greatest spiritual achievement, or certainly a great example of society at work as Durkheim would argue; or, as Marx would say, the kind of deceptive and manipulative attempt to keep a decadent and dying religion alive for the benefit of the upper Hindu priestly and warrior classes who saw their power and influence over the masses decline and who needed to reinvent themselves and their religion to secure and prolong their power and control over the people. Defend one of these interpretations (Durkheim, Marx). (Readings: Marx and Durkheim).

5. As commonly perceived, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, (Theistic) Hinduism of the Vedic and Bhakti/Devotional (the Bhagavad Gita) types offer: a. comparable other-worldly understanding of human “salvation” (liberation) and well-being: life in a beyond ths world or future life (heaven, paradise, or Nirvana), that seeks to exit the historical, material existence as either evil, unchangeable, and not subject to transformation. With the Upanishads, Hinduism offers a more Pantheistic (Self=God) understanding of salvation; Buddhism, although atheistic, understands human salvation (liberation) in terms of a change of consciousness in the face of suffering and acquiescence in (acceptance of) the status quo, both agreeing that life on earth is beyond repair and cannot be altered, and the only hope is in a new understanding of ourselves in relation to an illusory, impermanent existence. QUESTION: FIRST, how is this understanding of “salvation” (from evil, suffering, injustice, death) in the major world religions vulnerable to the Marxist interpretation and critique of religion; SECONDLY, is religion in principle (in its totality and essence) committed to an other-wordly, supra historical (i.e. beyond or above historical, or simply indifferent to material existence) understanding of salvation as Marx claimed? In other words, is religion only a tool for legitimation of the status quo; or, secondly, are there voices within at least some of these traditions that either command transformation of historical-material existence for the sake of humanity, or are susceptible to modification and revision that allows them to integrate action-in-the-world within without doing violence to their fundamental assumptions (against Marx’s interpretation of religion). (For this question you need to read, in addition to Marx in Pals, Livingston chapters 10, 11 and 13 and both of my handouts; Peter Berger’s selection on Blackboard is important for understanding the concept of “legitimation” in religion).

6. Although there is a wide gulf separating E. W. Hengstenberg’s Biblicist Confessionalism (i.e., Conservative Christianity, holding on the claims and concepts of the Bible interpreted literally) and the Liberal tradition stemming from Schleiermacher to Ritschl and Troeltsch(Handout I: Schleiermacher to Troeltsch), QUESTION: Do they have anything common? In particular, in how both points of view, liberal and conservative well into the late 19th century, deal with Christianity’s encounter with the world religions, the status of Christianity as compared with the non-Christian religions, the rise of the sociological-anthropological understanding and interpretation of religion (Marx, Durkheim, Tylor, Frazer), and the naturalistic-reductionist assumptions informing these disciplines? (For this question you should read carefully Handout I: Schleiermacher to Troeltsch, and should have read the Pals chapters on Marx, Durkheim, Tylor/Frazer).

STUDY OF RELIGION HANDOUT, PART I: 1800-1900

Prof. Daniel Alvarez, Florida International University

Bibliography and History: William Baird, History of New Testament Research: From Deism to Tubingen (Fortress, 1992); John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the 19th Century (S.P.C.K, 1984).

Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834). Major works: On Religion: Speeches to its Despisers among the Educated (1799, 3rd edition, 1821); Celebration of Christmas (1806); The Christian Faith (1821); Life of Jesus (published posthumously in the 1864); Introduction to the New Testament (1829-1832); and an influential work on Hermeneutics [Biblical interpretation], based on handwritten manuscripts (first published in 1838, but published in a critical edition without student notes in 1959). English translations of these works are in print, except for the Introduction to the New Testament.

One of the founders of the University of Berlin in 1810, preacher, classical scholar, whose translation of Plato’s Dialogues is the standard translation in Germany today. S. had close Jewish friends and was instrumental in the rise of Reform Judaism and Jewish emancipation. Otto von Bismarck, who in 1871 unified Germany, was S.’s catechumen as a young man. That in the same year that he became chancellor of a united Germany Jews were recognized as citizens with full civil rights might not be an accident (nor perhaps an accident either that Germany embarked on a path towards militarism and imperialism under Bismarck). Brought to Berlin W. M. L. de Wette (father of modern Old Testament criticism), Augustus Neander (father of modern church history, and famous for his dictum “the heart makes the theologian”), G. W. Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831), as well as E. W. Hengstenberg (d. 1866), the leader of German conservative theology from 1827 until his death. Influenced his young colleague, Friedrich Tholuck (d. 1877), specialist in Oriental languages, who became a conservative under the influence of E. W. Hengstenberg, but who in his early career believed Islam was superior to Christianity, and who wrote an important book on Sufism (Sufism, or the Pantheistic Philosophy of Persia [1821]) and a translation of Islamic mystical writings, Eastern Mysticism (1825). David F. Strauss (d. 1873) was his student at Berlin and was later to criticize severely S.’s Life of Jesus as seriously defective from a historical standpoint.

Scheliermacher is considered the father of Liberal theology. Although influenced by Kantian idealism, he shifts the essence of religion from dogma and revelation (orthodoxy) and ethics (Kant) to feeling. As he says elsewhere, religion is a matter of the heart, not the head, of the affections, not concepts (reminiscent of the theology of the American Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards [d. 1758]). He accepted the new historical criticism coming into its own in the 18th century, including the Kantian critique of religion that challenged the viability of the dogmatic and epistemological assumptions of 17th century Protestant scholastic theology; and he saw that a Christian faith based on the old assumptions would neither satisfy nor fit in with the new historical and scientific developments. In shifting the seat of religion to the heart, S. argued that no result of historical or scientific criticism of Christianity could destroy faith, since faith, our communion with God, is not dependent on the vagaries or accidents of historical or scientific investigations. Our communion or relationship to the divine is grounded in “the divine in our feelings,” or as he also says, our “God-consciousness,” and thus not dependent on the “concepts” through which our relationship to the divine has been variously expressed in different historical eras or even in different religions (cf. Speech V of On Religion).

However, by abandoning the basis of Christianity in dogma and revelation, and specifically, the Biblical revelation, as the normative sources for the interpretation of Christianity, S.’s interpretation of religion based on an inalienable god-consciousness (“feeling of dependence”), or “the sense of the heart,” is in danger of degenerating into pure subjectivism, pantheism, and relativism. Subjectivism, because concepts and reason are demoted to a subordinate status; what matters are one’s “feelings,” not truth in any objective sense, one’s faith rather than the facts and the object upon which that faith is grounded. Pantheism, because the radical distinction between God and the human appears to be obliterated. For S. the difference between Jesus and us is one of degree, not of kind. We are in principle capable of achieving a god-consciousness to the same extent and of the same kind as Jesus, thus denying Jesus’ unique relationship to God the Father as maintained by orthodox theology. Furthermore, for S. the incarnation becomes a symbol of the essential unity of the human and divine, and hence a denial of the radical transcendence of God and of the essential finitude of the human. A corollary of S.’s Christology is that Jesus’ role as savior of humankind is made superfluous, as well as his unique mediatorial role. Every human being, whether Christian or not, is in principle in the relationship to the divine as Jesus was, and thus Christianity becomes one vehicle through which our god-consciousness is awakened, but not the only one. Neither Jesus, his incarnation, his unique mediatorial and salvific role, nor the Christian religion can be taken as unique or as the exclusive location of the divine-human encounter, and thus S.’s position, despite his own high view of Jesus Christ, degenerates into relativism.

For S. hardly one dogma of Catholic, Reformation, or 17th century Protestant theology survives without major qualification or drastic reinterpretation. But to be fair to S., he saw himself as an apologist (advocate, defender) of the Christian faith for his generation. He believed that the radical paradigm shift brought about by the Enlightenment threatened to dissolve religion and Christianity in particular. S. thought that Christianity was much more than the dogmas, concepts, beliefs, assumptions, through which the Christian faith had been expressed by earlier generations. Christianity for him could not be held hostage by the worldview—historical, scientific, cultural, cosmologica assumptions–of the first generations of Christians. But to identify Christianity with the concepts through which it was expressed in times past as both the orthodox and the despisers of religion in the 18th century (atheists or skeptics who argued that Christianity and all religions are a mass of superstitions and falsehoods) whom he was directly addressing in his speeches did was to do precisely that. S. wanted to recast Christianity in modern terms, make it once more intelligible and compelling to men and women of his generation, and show that the greatness of the message of Jesus was still worth taking seriously. Whether in the end S. gave up too much (as Karl Barth, Gresham Machen, and Francis Schaeffer, among others, believed he did) I leave for you to judge.

Notable quotes from Schleiermacher: “It matters not what [concepts] a man adheres to, he can still be pious. His piety, the divine in his feelings, may be better than his [concepts], and his desire to place the essence of piety in [concepts] only makes him misunderstand himself” (On Religion, 3rd edition, translated by John Oman, 95, translation modified by me).

“Here it was that for the first time I awoke to the consciousness of the relations of man to a higher world… Here it was that that mystic tendency developed itself, which has been of so much importance to me, and has supported and carried me through all the storms of skepticism. Then it was only germinating; now it has attained its full development, and I may say, that after all that I have passed through, I have become Herrnhutter [Moravian Brethren, a Pietist sect with whom he studied in his youth] again, only of a higher order (from a letter to Gorg Reimer (April 30, 1802), quoted in Rowan Life of Schleiermacher, volume 1, 283-84).

Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (d. 1849). Major Works: Contributions to the Introduction to the Old Testament (1806); Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Books of the Old and New Testament (1817-1848); On Religion: Its Essence, the Forms of its Appearance and its Influence on Life (1827); Letters of Martin Luther (1825-28); The Essence of the Christian Faith from the Standpoint of Faith (1846); Short Exegetical Handbook to the New Testament (1836-48).

Influenced by Schleiermacher and the Kantian philosopher Jacob Fries. The father of the modern historical criticism of the Old Testament. In his ground-breaking Contributions of 1806, de Wette formulated a comprehensive interpretation of the Old Testament on strictly historical principles. The result was as spectacular as it was disturbing to many. De Wette acknowledge that it was S.’s (and Fries’ strikingly similar) approach to religion that had freed him to investigate the Bible critically, without fearing that his investigations and conclusions would destroy his faith. But the orthodox were not amused. The naïve picture of the origin and composition of the Hebrew Bible and the religion of Israel was subverted: The Books of Chronicles were late and worthless from a historical point of view, and the Levitical and Priestly religion of the books a post-exilic fabrication read back to the time of David and Solomon; Moses was certainly not the author of much, if any, of the books or the Levitical religion (as described in the bulk of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) attributed traditionally to him (the first five books or the Pentateuch), most of the contents of the Pentateuch being quite late (post-exilic, after the exile, in the 5th century); the Pentateuch are made up of documents or traditions or sources (J for Yahwist, E for Elohist), confirming what earlier critics (Astruc, 1753, and Eichorn, 1787) had argued; contradictions, historical errors, duplications that betray a complex literary tradition behind the narratives that undermines traditional claims to authorship abound in the Bible. Only the work of the prophets and the rise of a prophetic Yahwism, as well as the history of Israel contained in Judges-II Kings (reflecting the prophetic critique of Israelite religious practices), can be placed with any degree of probability between the 9th-6th century, or close to the traditional chronology.

De Wette was off the mark in one fundamental point however: The Levitical religion and institutions of Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers was dated by him as earlier than the book of Deuteronomy. It was up to his successors, in particular Bramberg, George, Kuenen, Graf, and finally Wellhausen to date priestly institutions and rituals to the exile, and hence posterior to Deuteronomy (which de Wette rightly dated to the 7th century B.C.). It was the identification and reconstruction of the “P” or Priestly source by the next generation of scholars (and Julius Wellhausen in the 1870s in particular) that solved the puzzles and tensions evident in de Wette’s reconstruction of the religion of Israel. His dating of Chronicles in the exilic period should have led him to see the priestly religion of the bulk of the Pentateuch, which issues from the same priestly circle and world of thought that produced Chronicles, as late as well, but it was not to be.

For de Wette, the naïve biblicist picture of the Bible as the “inerrant” word of God dominant until the 17th century, and the religion of Israel dependent on that picture, will not survive sustained, detailed, examination based on rigorous application critical-historical principles derived from secular history. Other critics, from Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Richard Simon, Jean Astruc, and a host of critics both in England (the Deists) and then in Germany (Eichorn, Gabler, Semler, Michaelis, Paulus) had seen pieces of the historical and literary problems before, but none had put the pieces together to produce a comprehensive historical-critical interpretation of the entire Old Testament as de Wette did. Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918), the greatest Old Testament scholar after de Wette, recognized in the 1870s that de Wette had anticipated the fundamental aspects of his own views of the Old Testament at least forty years before him. It should be noted that although de Wette is best known for his criticism of the Old Testament, he also wrote an important introduction and commentary to the New Testament, to which he applied the same critical principles he had applied to the study of the Old Testament and with equally devastating results.

Given the undeniable fact that de Wette was a passionate critic of the Bible, and that he assailed the traditional (orthodox) picture of the Bible with perhaps too much glee and enthusiasm, it is understandable that he alienated the conservatives in Germany, particularly and fatefully at a time when conservatism was on the ascendancy in 1817 and thereafter. In 1819 he was dismissed from Berlin and practically exiled to Switzerland, where he became professor at the University of Basel in 1822 until his death. German students were prohibited from studying with de Wette, given that from 1827-1866, under the leadership of Hengstenberg, Germany experienced a tide of conservatism that also blocked the professorship of the more radical David F. Strauss in 1835. It took the personal intervention of Otto von Bismarck in 1871 for Adolf von Harnack, a liberal church historian, to be appointed professor of Church History at Berlin.

However, to think that de Wette was simply a destructive critic with no positive view of religion would be a gross mistake and an incomplete characterization of his work. Like Schleiermacher, to whose interpretation of religion de Wette’s own bears a strong affinity and family resemblance, de Wette did not understand his work as on the whole negative. He believed that the “rubble” had to be cleared first before the permanent in religion and Christianity in particular could emerge with greater force and clarity. Notwithstanding the “fallible forms” or garb through which religion is mediated to us through the historic religions (with Christianity being one form of religion, among others), once the critical moment is completed, one can move towards a “constructive” moment where the movement of God is now transparent and discernable (“graspable”) in the religious life, institutions, myths, history, and literary productions. Far from seeing his work as merely destructive, de Wette saw his work as preparatory to an appreciation and appropriation of the religious spirit and the work of God in and through the religion of Israel and its continuation and fulfillment in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Through the fallible, the finite, the uncertain (for history gives us only probabilities and educated guesses with no hope for absoluteness or definitiveness in our judgments), the communion of the Israelites with God is palpable; the Bible gives us an “intimation” or a “presentiment” (technical terms for de Wette) of God’s presence, “graspable” now not through the objective certainties and dogmatic beliefs of an ahistorical orthodoxy, but through the humble, often conflicting and contradictory, manipulated and embellished, distorted and hyped, yet nevertheless, and in spite of it all, real and compelling testimony of all-too-human witnesses to and transmitters to us of the work of God in their lives and hearts. De Wette remained to his last days, like Schleiermacher before him and Ferdinand Christian Baur after him, a preacher.

But what we said about Schleiermacher applies with equal force to de Wette. His position, like Schleiermachers’, fails to satisfy us because it is unstable. It wants to be historical, but faithful to the Christian faith. But can it be both without loss to one or the other? This question was answered decisively by Strauss, but not in the way we would like. Mysticism of the Schleiermachian or de Wettian variety might save religion, but what about Christianity? The title of one of de Wette’s books is suggestive in this regard: On Religion: Its Essence, the Forms of its Appearance and its Influence on Life. Religion takes many forms, one of which is Christianity. Relativism, subjectivism, and pantheism rear their ugly head again.

Notable quote from de Wette: “I would gladly have arrived at results more definite and more in harmony with the views generally received in the Church; but the Truth can alone decide. That is no genuine love of Truth which is not ready to sacrifice its inordinate curiosity where certainty is unattainable, as well as its pious prejudices. The value of criticism I place chiefly in the activity to which it excites the spirit of inquiry; but this spirit of inquiry can never harm a genuine Christian piety (quoted by Baird, History of New Testament Criticism, 224, from de Wette’s Historico-Critical Introduction to the Canonical Books of the New Testament, 5th edition, 1848, v).

To that quote one may add another, reflecting the same spirit, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “He, who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all” (“Moral and Religious Aphorisms, XXV,” in Aids to Reflection [1826]).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831). Major works: Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Science of Logic [“Greater Logic”] (1813-1816), Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences [“Lesser” Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Mind] (1817-1830), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831).

Hegel was the first major scholar to lecture on world religions, four times between 1821 and 1827. He was a colleague of Schleiermacher (and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer) at Berlin from 1817 until his death in 1831. If S.’s philosophy and theology are focused on “feeling” (the affections or emotions) and religious experience, Hegel’s philosophy focused on the intellect, on Reason (capital “R”), and Reason’s ability to know God, to know reality, in contrast to both Schleiermacher and Kant, since Kant denied that we can have real knowledge of reality (except as it “appears” to us, never as it is “in itself”) or of God, and not even of God’s existence.

Kant’s theory of knowledge, central to S.’s understanding of God, is that we do have real knowledge, but only of a reality that is in some sense “in us.” The Understanding has power to impose a structure on appearances (the way we are affected by reality), but these “appearances” exist entirely within our consciousness. Even our sense of space and time are forms of sensibility that exist within consciousness’ immanent (or “transcendental”) field, and this transcendental field includes also a rational (categoreal) structure that orders (i.e. imposes a structure on) the stimuli originating or having their source beyond or outside consciousness. So, for example, when we look at any object, we perceive it as outside of us, as one, and in causal relations or interactions with other objects, as subject to time-determinations, as existing, as having a host of sensible properties, and, furthermore, we can anticipate that any future of experience of any sense experience of the “world” will appear to us clothed, as it were, in those structural, general properties. The objectivity of the world of experience is not guaranteed by empirical experience (which is uncertain and subjective and, in itself, not subject to rules) but by the universal, invariant categoreal structure of REASON.

So for Kant there is knowledge of objects given to us in sense experience, and it is objective knowledge, but this knowledge is nonetheless limited to the sensible; beyond the bounds of sense experience nothing can be known. But Hegel (and a few others, including Kant himself) noticed that Kant’s view of knowledge leads to a very undesirable consequence: you end up with two worlds, two realities, two types of objects. One reality (and object) exists within consciousness, because that reality is constructed by the Understanding’s operation of the data of the senses. But the Understanding, said Kant, cannot produce (i.e. create) the stimuli or the data itself; it can provide the structure, but the structure is without content until experience (of a something other than consciousness) provides us with the content. But where is this content coming from, if it does not originate from within consciousness? From “outside” in a much different sense of “outside.” There is the “outside” within consciousness; but there is an absolute “outside” from whence originates the content upon which the Understanding runs its operations. This “outside” source Kant calls the Thing-in-itself. But if we know nothing about this supersensible reality (literally, beyond sense experience), first, how do we know it’s there; and how could it enter into a causal relationship with our consciousness, which is limited to sense experience, that is the sensible? This conundrum and the need to solve is what gets Hegel’s philosophy off the ground.

Hegel argues that if there is real knowledge, then there cannot be two realities, two objects, one sensible and the other supersensible. (Remember that sensibility in us cannot produce or generate the stimuli; sensibility is passive and can only receive stimuli, input, from a source or cause other than itself.) Assuming that real knowledge is not only possible but attainable, Hegel argues against Kant that there is only one reality, and subject (consciousness) and object exist within that one reality. Kant was on the right track, the object is indeed “inside” consciousness, but not in a relative but in an absolute sense; Consciousness generates both the concepts or the categories of Reason and the object (i.e. the content) itself. That is why we can know reality, because reality is not beyond consciousness or Reason, but is produced or “constituted” by Reason itself. That Reason Hegel calls Geist (German, Spirit). The object, reality, is us looking back at itself. Or as Hegel puts it more dramatically, Reality is “God looking back at itself” as in a mirror!

The point is not that Hegel is right; the point is that he is right vis à vis Kant. Unless something like what Hegel is saying is right (there is no gap between thought and reality), then objective knowledge is not possible. A reality totally independent our the Understanding’s categoreal structure cannot be guaranteed to obey the rules given by the structure, and even Kant understood that most clearly! [Students interested in where Kant recognizes this can see me or ask me in class.]

So religion is for Hegel not grounded in mystical experience (as in S.); and in fact it is not grounded in historical evidences or proofs. Both experience and history are questionable (as his great disciple, David F. Strauss sought to demonstrate [see below]). We can know reality and we can know God, because we are beings who are Spirit or Consciousness (in theological language, God) in principle; and history is our ascent to a self-consciousness of ourselves as Spirit and of reality itself as Spirit, Consciousness. Indebted to the Enlightenment, Hegel (and S.) recognized that neither Christianity nor religion can be defended on the basis of dogma or revelation, nor on the basis of history; religion, if it is to survive in the modern world, needs to be grounded in something else, and that for Hegel was his philosophical system and interpretation of knowledge and reality. Both S. and Hegel saw themselves as defenders of the Christian faith and of the place of religion in the post-Enlightenment world. S. on the basis of religious experience; Hegel on the basis of a an interpretation of reality that he claimed saved and preserved the doctrines (content, message) of Christianity, but now (correctly) in terms of philosophy. Christianity is not founded on history (“external” events) but on deep truths that can only be properly understood and appropriated through a vast philosophical re-interpretation.

So what becomes of the “incarnation” in Hegel? In humanity and creation, God has become incarnate (see Strauss’ “Preface” to the Life of Jesus

[posted on Blackboard]

). We are the expression of God in his finite dimension (just as God in the traditional language of dogma is the infinite polarity of the finite-infinite dimension of Geist. The death of Jesus on the cross? God died on the cross literally because God had to experience finitude to the fullest extent (i.e. incarnation in a finite human being, the experience of death, the most extreme form of finitude). What is “the finite” for Hegel? A category of his Science of Logic, which for Hegel captures the structure of God’s reality, and all the phases or stages through which God (Spirit) has to pass (or experience) as the development of God in history! “Salvation”? The realization of freedom and justice in history, which will come to pass since history is the field in which God realizes his “will” (manifests God’s self). What of the “Holy Spirit”? It is the reconciliation of the finite of the infinite as realized in the Christian community, the kingdom of God on earth, where the will of God is realized as it is in “heaven.” Hegel has “demythologized” the concepts of dogma, but has sought to preserve their content in a way that can be defended against both the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and Dogmatic theology, on the other; and that can be established on the basis of a firm philosophical and logical foundation!

But for some, like E. W. Hengstenberg, both S. and Hegel represented the destruction of Christianity. Even Hegel commented that his “translation” of Christian concepts to his philosophical and political thought would be perceived not as a preservation of the content but its elimination. For Hengstenberg, the content is inseparable from the concepts, and therefore traditional concepts taken literally must be defended against the subjectivism of S.’s mysticism and the rationalistic translation of Hegel that only manages to destroy Christianity, not save it.

What about the non-Christian religions? Christianity was for Hegel the “absolute” religion, the highest stage of the evolution of Spirit in history. There is no question about that. But he recognizes the march or manifestation of Spirit (God) in all religions, from the most primitive to the highest. Neither S. nor Hegel abandoned their belief that Christianity was the highest and most spiritual of all religions.

David Friedrich Strauss (d. 1873). Major works: Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835); The Christian Faith in its Historical Development and in War with Modern Knowledge [Wissenschaft] (1840-41); In Defense of My Life of Jesus Against the Hegelians (1841); Life of Jesus For the German People (1864); The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of the Schleiermachian Life of Jesus (1865); The Old and the New Faith (1873). Student of Hegel (for one year) and Schleiermacher at Berlin, and Ferdinand Christian Baur at Tubingen, and later Professor there until his dismissal in 1836.

Strauss criticized all that went before him, and specially Schleiermacher, for not applying the historical method with thorough-going rigor. For Strauss, all his predecessors had straddled the fence, feigning to uphold and apply the historical method but shielding enough of the “supernatural” from it to save their faith. In his Life of Jesus of 1835, Strauss abandons all attempts that try preserve the historicity of the Biblical narrative through a “rationalistic” explanation in non-supernatural terms (Paulus); all “mediating” efforts (Schleiermacher, de Wette, Neander, Tholuck) that either limit the supernatural only to the most exceptional cases (e.g., the resurrection), or elevate it to the “supra-historical” (beyond and above history and historical investigation) level accessible only through faith or direct religious experience; and the old “supernaturalism,” defended most ably by Hengstenberg from 1827 onward, that takes the Bible as it is as giving us a factual and literal record of what actually happened, with miracles, resurrection, incarnation, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, messianic prophecies, and verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy. Instead Strauss, in the first edition of Life of Jesus (1835), under the influence of a Hegel, believes that he has proven Hegel’s point: that the “representational” interpretation of Christianity as historical “fact” has been destroyed by historical criticism and only myth is left.

The validation of Christianity on the basis of history is denied by a careful historic-critical investigation of the life of Jesus, and only a philosophical appropriation of Christianity based on Hegel’s system, where the content [Inhalt] or message is preserved can save Christianity from refutation. [Only much later, will Strauss reject Hegel and move towards a more radical form of Naturalism, the only point of view consistent with the standpoint of secular critical history and modern science according to him, in his last work, The Old and the New Faith.] From the historical (and implicitly naturalistic) standpoint, Strauss jettisons the virgin birth, miracles (except for a few that have natural, psychological or psychosomatic explanation), resurrection, incarnation, and the like. The incarnation and virgin birth are clearly mythological; the resurrection not only mythological but also “impossible” from a modern scientific point of view. The appearances of the risen Jesus must have been some sort of mass hallucination or hysteria, or something like it. For Strauss, the gospels, and particularly the Gospel of John, are unhistorical; they furnish us with fragments so laden with myth—for him, unhistorical fiction, which, from a Hegelian standpoint is proper to the representational-external mode of thinking, although not without some truth that can only be recovered by a philosophical, conceptual-philosophical interpretation, that is, Hegel’s—,contradictions, and improbabilities, that a reconstruction of the life of the Jesus historically is impossible. Myth has swallowed up Jesus, and what can be salvaged at best from the Gospel records is the Idea (i.e. content or message) that in history the Absolute (Spirit) of Hegel has manifested itself, although Strauss adds emphatically, by no means uniquely in the one man Jesus of Nazareth (cf. “Preface” to the first edition of the Life of Jesus, on Blackboard). Ironically, if anything historical can be salvaged from the gospels said Strauss is Jesus’ belief in his imminent return (the 2nd coming, or the coming of the “Son of Man”), which Strauss takes Jesus to have said it would take place during the life-time of the disciples (cf. Matthew 10:23, 16:28; Mark 9:1 and parallels; II Peter 3:3, 4). And in this belief, Jesus was clearly proven to be wrong. The strong “delay motif” in Luke and II Peter is prove that the apologetic strategy of the third generation of Christians to stave off criticism of the failure of the second coming to materialize was failing. Only the spiritual or allegorical interpretation of Christianity by the late 2nd century and dominant for 1500 years was able to deflect and in the end repress and suppress the unvarnished truth that historical criticism had now made irresistible obvious since Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ Wolfenbüttel Fragments since their publication by Lessing in 1768 and now established decisively by Strauss’ even more rigorous examination.

The Life of Jesus was perceived to be, correctly, a brilliant but utterly destructive work. Strauss realized this and promised a constructive part II (on Hegelian basis) to follow this first, the ground-clearing part. Part II never appeared; Strauss never overcame or transcended (using a technical Hegelian term) the first moment. In fact, his work became progressively more critical, and caustic, until in his last work, his testament, he transcends religion altogether. He did overcome the tension plaguing the mediating theologians such as Schleiermacher, but only by an elimination of religion and Christianity. Hengstenberg, of all people, wrote an appreciative review of the book. And Hengstenberg also noted, possibly not without pride (or arrogance), that Strauss was the only consistent Liberal theologian, the only one willing uncompromisingly to follow through on his naturalistic assumptions all the way to the end; all the others held back, not because they were not as naturalistic as Strauss, but because they lacked the integrity or conviction that Strauss had. Strauss did in fact severely castigated Schleiermacher for not being faithful to the historical-critical method Schleiermacher aspired to apply in his Life of Jesus (the lectures of which Strauss attended). For Hengstenberg Strauss’ Life of Jesus represented the reductio ad absurdum of Liberalism and historical criticism, or at any rate, a historical criticism that was not at the service of Christianity and the Bible, and hence the greatest vindication of supernaturalist Christianity based on the absoluteness of the Biblical revelation. For Hengstenberg there was no middle ground possible: Either we go with supernatural Christianity or we must become in the end, like Strauss, atheists.

Ferdinand Christian Baur (d. 1860). Major works: Symbolism and Mythology or the Nature Religion of Antiquity (1824); The Manichean Religious System According to the Sources Newly Investigated and Developed (1831 ), two works showing Baur’s concern with the history of religions (anticipating Troeltsch’s standpoint); The Opposition of Catholicism and Protestantism According to the Principles and Major Dogmas of both Conceptual Systems (1833 ); The so-called Pastoral Letters of the Apostle Paul (1835), where he challenged Pauline authorship of these letters (anticipated by Schleiermacher in this); The Epochs of Church Historical Writing (1852), a major essay on historiography; Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life, and Impact, his Letters and his Teaching (1845); Critical Investigations of the Canonical Gospels, in their Relationship to Each Other, their Character and Origin (1847); Christianity and the Christian Church in the First Three Centuries (1853). The books on Paul and early Christianity were the most important works on Paul and the early Church history of the 19th century, and the culmination of years of laborious research that began with the work on “The Christ-Party in the Corinthian Church, the Opposition between Petrine and Pauline Christianity in the Early Church …” (1831).

What de Wette was to the Old Testament, Strauss to the life of Jesus, Baur was to Paul and the history of early Christianity. Baur was Strauss’ teacher at Tubingen. When Strauss was dismissed from Tubingen, Baur was the only faculty member who did not vote against him. He argued that academic freedom should prevail in the universities, and he also voiced the opinion that what Strauss had said was already known or suspected in academic circles (although no one had been able to synthesize the material with the systematic coherence and methodological clarity and consistency as Strauss had). Baur agreed with Strauss on all the major points of the work and, most importantly, with Strauss’ historical methodology, although he felt that Strauss had been unnecessarily negative (sarcasm and ridicule abound throughout the work), and superficial in his handling of the source materials (deficiencies Baur attempted to correct in his 1847 work on the Gospels). Baur believed the gospel accounts contained more history than Strauss was willing to acknowledge. In particular, Baur believed it difficult to explain the rise of the resurrection faith apart from the impact of the historical Jesus. “If Jesus in his whole appearance was not more than results from this [Strauss’s] investigation, then it remains all the more puzzling how the conviction of the disciples, that he must have risen from the dead, could have developed (Baird, 255).

He also said that he was not (at that time) competent to judge the work of his brilliant student, whether shrewdly to protect his own neck from colleagues who always suspected Baur no less than Strauss, or honestly since no one had until Strauss subjected the life of Jesus to such piercing analysis and criticism. It is interesting that Baur’s research focused on Paul and early church history, indirect evidence (at least to me) that he believed that Strauss had put the study of the gospels and the life of Jesus on sound historical grounds. To the end, Strauss remained loyal and grateful to his teacher. Reproducing Baird verbatim:

Shortly before Baur’s death, Strauss wrote: “While you in your writings and in your scientific school have established a might fortress, the flat land of theology has sunk into a condition of incredible degeneration. Compared with other theologians, “You appear as a watchman among the dreamers, a sober man among the drunken, as a man among boys, a giant among dwarfs” (Baird, History of New Testament Research, 255, who quotes it from Horton Harris, Strauss and His Theology [Oxford University Press, 1975]).

The major achievement of Baur, and one that still haunts our study and reconstruction of the history of early Christianity (late 1st and 2nd century), is his argument that there was a deep rift between a type of Hellenistic-Greek Christianity represented most notably by Paul, and Jewish or Judaizing Christianity represented by Peter (and James) and the Jerusalem apostles. To support this claim Baur carefully studied the Pauline letters (Galatians and II Corinthians in particular), the Book of Acts, and the later or Catholic Epistles (Jude, I and II Peter, including the Pastorals, Ephesians, which for Baur are not from Paul [a judgment subsequent scholarship has confirmed], and James). Paul’s interpretation of Christianity was so un-Jewish, and in some cases so anti-Jewish, that the Jerusalem apostles resented and opposed Paul’s version of Christianity and tried to undermine his mission. Paul, as II Corinthians 11-13 and Galatians 2 show according to Baur, would not submit either to the authority of the Jerusalem apostles nor conform his “gospel” to theirs. The Letter of James, as even Luther recognized, contains a very explicit critique of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith alone, and a Jewish emphasis on works [of the Law]. This conflict was finally resolved by the “early Catholicism” of the late New Testament letters, including primarily the Book of Acts, and not only the traditional “catholic” (or universal) letters, such as Jude, I and II Peter, but also James, the Pastorals and Ephesians. The Book of Acts, which devotes 14 chapters to Peter, and the last 14 chapters to Paul, is for Baur the clearest example of the work of reconciling (with apparent difficulties even for the author of Acts) Petrine with Pauline Christianity, with Petrine Christianity triumphing in the end with Acts subordination of Paul to the authority of the Jerusalem apostles in Acts 15 and status as their agent in the propagation of the gospel. Peter is made by the author of Acts the leader of the gentile (Greek) mission, and Paul is presented as acting in greater conformity and sympathy with Judaism than the Paul of his own letters would allow us to deduce.

The errors in dating some of the New Testament writings Baur was led to make by his Hegelian reconstruction of the development of early Christianity between Paul and the mid-2nd century have led many to dismiss Baur too easily. The fact that his reconstruction, for all its obvious and confirmed defects (e.g. he dates the Pastorals to the middle or late 2nd, and John to the late 2nd century, as well as an oversimplication of the complex views and parties during mid-1st to mid-2nd centuries), should not overshadow the fact that Baur’s shadow continues to loom large in the reconstruction of the history of early Christianity, a history which to date no scholar has been able to tell in such a comprehensive and compelling way as Baur. Because of his alleged Hegelian presuppositions, which according to his critics clouded his judgment and made him force early Christianity into an artificial procrustean bed of his own making, Baur’s work has been summarily dismissed by many. Yet it is becoming progressively clear to scholars that Baur embarked on a historical reconstruction on rigorous historical principles, which stands on its own independently and in spite of his Hegelianism. Baur came self-consciously to see his task as that of doing for Paul and early Christianity what his student Strauss had done for Jesus and the Gospels (whose work likewise stands on its own, despite Strauss’ explicitly stated identification with Hegel’s philosophy).

Before I leave the period dominated by Strauss and Baur, I must mention the work of E. W. Hengstenberg, such as The Authenticity of Daniel and the Integrity of Zachariah (1831), The Authenticity of the Pentateuch (1836-39), and Christology of the Old Testament (2nd edition, 1854-57) against liberals of every stripe (whether Schleiermachian or moderate [“mediating”], or more radical like Strauss and Baur); and the sustained and still compelling critiques of Strauss, Baur, and the Tübingen School (founded by Baur) by Theodore Gottlieb (Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 1874) and George P. Fisher (Essays on the Supernatural Origins of Christianity, 1865). So impressive was the apologetic work of these men that 20th century conservative critiques of liberalism have not advanced very far beyond the arguments in these works. Students who are interested in pursuing conservative or evangelical critiques of 19th (and by extension, 20th) century liberalism should consult C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford, 1996), and Horton Harris, The Tübingen School (1975) and David Friedrich Strauss (1973). For the American and British responses to German historical criticism at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, cf. Living Papers Concerning Christian Evidences, Doctrine, and Morals (Ten volumes, ca. 1887), and The Fundamentals (Four volumes, 1917), and I should add the later but continuous (in principle and tone) work of R. Laird Harris, Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible (1957). Today, the kind of defense of Christianity favored by Hengstenberg, whereby the critics of Christianity are met on their own terms (historical criticism and science), has received renewed stimulus since the 1980s through the work of Alvin Plantinga (since the late 1960s), and Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig , and J. P. Moreland (since the 1980s). These thinkers use philosophy and science to argue against the critics of Christianity (most notably, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawkings, and a host of atheistic or naturalistic-minded philosophers and scientists. All of these thinkers are still alive as of 2015.

Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918). Major works: Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1878); The Composition of the Hexateuch and of the Historical Books of the Old Testament (1889), which reprints his earlier (1876-77) articles published in the Yearbook for German Theology, Volumes 21, 22; Israel,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edition (1881); Israelite and Jewish History (1894).

There were many scholars who labored in the field of Old Testament between de Wette and Wellhausen. The names of Vatke, Graf, Kuenen Dutch), Ewald, Bramberg, George immediately come to mind as the key contributors, and to a lesser degree Gesenius, Bunsen, Bleek, Hofmann. But to de Wette and Wellhausen belongs the bulk of the glory as the two dominant figures of 19th century Old Testament critical scholarship. As an important important bridge between de Wette and Wellhausen, the work of Karl Heirich Graf (d. 1869), The Historical Books of the Old Testament (2 volumes) has to be mentioned. In this work, “like de Wette, Graf argued for the untrustworthiness of Chronicles in order to remove the support of that book for the view of Israelite religion that saw priestly-levitical institutions as dating at least from Solomon

[institutions that are absent from the parallel narrative in the books
of Kings]

(Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 258); and he argued, against de Wette and rightly, that Deuteronomy was earlier than the priestly-legal-temple material (in the bulk of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers), perhaps the fundamental (but at the time understandable) weakness of de Wette’s Beitr?ge (1806). Wellhausen, building on the work of Graf, et al., went on to argue that with Ezekiel in the 6th century B.C., “one saw the movement towards the triumph of the priestly over the prophetic, and the Priestly Code and its back-projection of priestly religion [as seen in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers] to the time of Moses marked, together with Chronicles [a work from priestly circles], the complete triumph of the priestly” (Rogerson, ibid., 265). De Wette in effect figured out J, E, and D, but not P (Priestly Code); it was left to Wellhausen, putting together the pieces given to him by De Wette, and then George, Bramberg, Graf, and Kuenen, into the dominant theory of the origins and composition of the Pentateuch, the Documentary Hypothesis (after the documents J, E, D, P).

Rise of Positivism and Scientific Philosophy after Hegel

After 1840 Hegelianism in Germany was dead Some of his most important disciples—David F. Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer, and Karl Marx—had repudiated the religious idealism of Hegel and taken a sharp turn towards materialism and atheism. This anti-Hegelianism was accompanied both in Germany and France with a return to the radical empiricism of John Locke and David Hume (along with the most materialist and anti-religious aspects of the Enlightenment), with a strong emphasis on the growing prestige of naturalism in science after Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of the Species in 1859. In France Auguste Comte (d. 1857) had proclaimed the rise of a new philosophy: Positivism, which banished all metaphysics (anything beyond the evidence of the senses and what the natural sciences can verify) as illusion and fiction. This “scientific philosophy” had a strong influence on the emerging disciplines of sociology (Durkheim, Weber), anthropology (E. B. Tylor, James Frazer), and psychology (Freud). For Comte the world had gone through three stages: the religious, the philosophical, and the scientific. The scientific age had arrived and the previous two ages had passed.

When Albrecht Ritschl, the most significant religious thinker of the second half of the 19th century, is writing there has been a reaction to the very anti-spiritual, anti-religious spirit of Positivism, and many thinkers in Germany saw a return to Kant’s philosophy as the only way to reclaim the spiritual (ideal) dimension of reality that naturalistic Positivism had banished to the nether world of fiction and delusion. Kant had sharply distinguished between the realm of the senses, the region of appearance (the province of science, how things appear to us), and the supersensible realm of reality beyond the senses (the province of religion and morality, the things in themselves). Knowledge is limited to the sensory, empirical evidence, but reality is not co-extensive with the sensible. Meta-physical (literally, beyond the physical, the sensible) cannot be proven or known by reason or science, but it cannot be disproved or proved to be illusion. There is a sharp divide for Kant here, and in his great work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787 2nd edition), he had argued that the realm of the sensible (science, things as they appear to or affect us cannot infringe on the realm of the supersensible, the realm of morality and religion). We cannot experience or know God as he is in himself (or whether he exists), but we can have faith in God and direct access to our “moral sense” and “freedom” within ourselves. As he put in the preface to the second edition of the CPR, “I must put limits to reason to make room faith.” We can only know how things affect us, or the effects alone of the things in themselves. This “back to Kant” movement in the 1870s begins with Friedrich Lange’s publication of his History of Materialism (1877) and the Neo-Kantian movement in Germany began in earnest and continued well into the early 20th century. This revival of Kant gave an enormous impetus to theology, and Ritschl’s appropriation of Kant for theology and the interpretation of Christianity led to most important development in Christian theology at the end of the 19th century.

Albrecht Ritschl (1839-1889). Major works: The Emergence of the Early Catholic Church: A Churchly- and Dogmatic-Historical Study (2nd edition, 1857) The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconcilation (1870-74, 3 volumes, with the third volume being the most important for understanding Ritschl’s point of view); Theology and Metaphysics (1881); Instruction in Christian Religion (1875); History of Pietism (1880-86, 3 volumes).

Ritschl did not write much, compared with other thinkers; however, his influence in the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th was without equal. He is to the second half of the 19th century what Schleiermacher was to the first. Originally a follower of the Tübingen School (Ferdinand Christian Baur), by 1857 he broke away from its influence and started to develop his own distinctive point of view. Under the influence of Kant (d. 1804), he accepted that God was not knowable as he is in himself. Therefore, all we can do as Christians is to go back to the historical Jesus and the sources of early Christianity (especially the Bible) to find out what the foundations of the Christian faith are to which we, as Christians, are and should be committed. For R. these foundations are: Jesus, the church, and the kingdom of God. Jesus is he through which God justifies (makes righteous) and reconciles humanity to Himself.

Beyond the historic Christian faith we know nothing else about God, and therefore our faith and understanding of God has to be strictly based on the Christian witness to God as found in our Bible. God known not through individual mystical experience (as Pietists emphasized, the ones that influenced Schleiermacher), but only through the community, the church; and it is the business of the church founded by Jesus to realize the kingdom of God on earth, the message of the kingdom of God being one of the two major aspects of Jesus’ teaching (the other being the church itself). The church is the means God is using to bring about the good news of the gospel to the world and reconcile humanity to Himself. As Christians we take the New Testament witness as foundational and authoritative, which although not perfect (R. is not a Biblicist, like Hengstenberg and modern-day fundamentalists), is correct in its general outline (i.e. the message of justification, reconciliation, the church, the kingdom of God, and the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth and the force of his personality and influence that continues to live in and through the church, the community of the faithful in whom Christ’s spirit dwells and influence through the ages is felt). No amount of historical studies and criticism, which R. encouraged, as practiced by Strauss, Baur, de Wette, or Wellhausen and co. can affect the central message of the Old and New Testaments (the Bible).

How does Ritschl’s theology work? Here are some examples.

On Jesus Christ:

In himself, Christ is completely unknowable to us; to the extent that he is [an] object of our knowing, he is an appearance. All that Scripture and church doctrine say about him does not describe his essence but only expresses the religious consciousness of the church. Christ is nothing more than the Christ appearance in the consciousness of the church. The Holy Spirit is not a being, not a person, but the foundation of the communal consciousness of being a child of God. The case is similar with all doctrine.

And:

Ritschl claims that theology can say nothing about Christ’s divine nature, his essential unity with the Father, or his pre- and post-existence {as human}. The question is not what or who Christ is in himself but only about his value and significance for us. The Christological dogmas are of no value in helping the church express its valuation of the person of Christ.

On theology:

… theology is never concerned with the realities of Scripture, God, Christ, Holy Spirit, etc., in themselves, but only as they are for us. Each phenomenon, therefore, is dependent on the observing and knowing capacity of human beings. A thing that is not observed is unknowable, is nothing; it becomes a thing only when observed, thanks to the relationship that it now has with the knowing subject. Therefore, God does not exist without his kingdom, Christ does not exist without his church that confesses him as their Lord, revelation does not exist apart from those who receive it, justification does not exist without faith, and so forth. What they might be in themselves is idle speculation.

On knowledge of God:

“The nature of God and the Divine we can only know in its essence by determining

its value [emphasis mine] for our salvation. . . . we know God only by revelation, and therefore also must understand the Godhead of Christ, if it is to be understood at all, as an attribute revealed to us in His saving influence upon ourselves.”

The conservative Reformed (Calvinist) theologian, Herman Bavinck (d. 1921), from whom these quotations come, charged Ritschl with subjectivism. God, Christ exist only for us, as subjective dimension of our experience, and only a very reduced form, as we find these concepts of value for us. Apart from our valuation, our own consciousness (i.e. subjectivity), they are nothing to us or in themselves. Ritschl would reply that he is not denying the objective reality of these objects (objects in a logical sense); only that we only know their effects on the self-consciousness of Christians through the ages (as Schleiermacher had said in his mature work, The Christian Faith [1821]) beginning with the work of Jesus in early Christianity. That is all we have available to us; beyond that historical witness “about these realities and all we have are their effects upon us, how do we know they really exist in themselves? Kant himself could not assure us that God exists, and all we have is faith; maybe they are all illusions created by a needy consciousness that fabricates them (as Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, Freud and co. would claim). Ritschl I don’t believe can entirely disavow this possibility. All he can reply is that “we have these effects, these historical influences that cannot be denied, and that they are of enormous value and significance to us. All we can do, as Kant say, once knowledge and proof is denied to us, is to have faith that they are not make-believe.” Furthermore, the church, the community of Christians provide a corrective to any descent into subjectivism. For Ritschl, Jesus lives on, as a memory, as an effect in the church, not in individual personal, mystical experience (which does lead into subjectivism). The center of gravity in theology for Ritschl lies in the church, where Christ’s influence dwells as an abiding “presence.”

At the end of the 19th century Ritschlian theology and theologians dominated the landscape. Against the mystical and individualistic aspect of Schleiermacher and Pietism, R. emphasized church and community; Christ is experienced not individually, but in and through the community, the church. This emphasis on church, community, and the kingdom of God (which was not absent from the mature Schleiermacher) was to influence the theology of the social gospel that has shaped the agenda of liberal Christianity until our day (the emphasis social, economic, and political justice so characteristic of liberal Christianity, for example). This side of Ritschl even Ernst Troeltsch, the great theoretician of the History-of-Religions school, found of great significance and value. The greatest historian of dogma, Adolf von Harnack, was a Ritschlian, who articulated the view of theology known as the Essence-of-Christianity approach in the manifesto of liberal Christianity, The Essence of Christianity (1900, English translation, What is Christianity).

But as Troeltsch perceptively noted, Ritschl’s approach to Christianity tends to degenerate into a kind of biblicism (emphasis on the Bible, but in Ritschl’s case without inerrancy, dogmatism, and hostility to historical criticism) and exclusivism that ignores the encounter of Christianity with the world religions, on the one hand; and also tends to ignore the relativizing impact of history on the claims to absoluteness and finality of Christianity (as Ritschl believed), on the other. Ritschlian theologians tended to be religious exclusivists, who were totally indifferent to the impact the study of the non-Christian religions was having at the end of the 19th century. Ritschl writes from such a pronounced internalist (i.e. inside Christianity) point of view that he is indifferent and impervious to new developments, as if the anthropological and ethnological study of non-Western cultures and religions (E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, 1871) is not happening around him, for example. It is this absence of awareness of the changing historical situation, including as well the ongoing historical investigation into early Christianity, that would render questionable this aspect of the approach to Christianity and religion of Ritschl and his followers for Troeltsch. Troeltsch did find Ritschl’s emphasis on the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth, the community, the church, and the kingdom of God to be perhaps the most important and lasting contribution of Ritschl the Christian faith. In the second Handout I deal with Karl Barth’s critique Liberalism from a totally different perspective.

Ernst Troeltsch (d. 1923). Major works: “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology” (1898); The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions (1901); The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912); “The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School” (1913); “What does ‘Esssence of Christianity’ Mean?” (1913); “The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith” (1911); Historicism and its Problems (1922); “The Place of Christianity among the World Religions” (1923); The Christian Faith (1925, posthumous).

It is the legacy of Schleiermacher, de Wette, Strauss, Baur, and Wellhausen that Ernst Troeltschhas in mind when he speaks of the historical method in his great essay of 1898, “On Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology.” These were the early architects and builders of the grand Liberal Tradition in theology, to which others like Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Herrmann (theology, with an Schleiermachian emphasis on personal religious experience), Adolf von Harnack (Ritschlian, church history), Julius Wellhausen (Old Testament), among many others, and Troeltsch (history of religions) himself were to add finishing touches and perhaps a few wrinkles here and there. But one major unforeseen consequence of the Schleiermachian approach to theology, and the encounter with the world religions, was the radical undermining of the “dogmatic” assumption of the absoluteness and finality of Christianity. Already Kant, Schleiermacher in Speech V of On Religion, and the writings of de Wette, Baur, and even Tholuck (on Islam in the early 1820s) make clear, the religious consciousness, now severed from, and made independent and prior to, the Christian revelation opened the possibility that non-Christian “revelations” and religious experiences could also mediate an apprehension of the transcendent and the sacred comparable (and as the young Tholuck exclaimed, superior) to Christianity. The hegemony of Christianity was broken quite early then, despite Troeltsch’s own effort to maintain as late as 1901 the “absoluteness of Christianity” (in his book, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions). Already in his paper of 1898, Troeltsch had realized that there was no way to retreat from or abandon the historical method honed in the previous one hundred years. In 1923, a few months before his death, in a lecture posthumously read at Oxford University entitled, “The Place of Christianity among the World Religions,” Troeltsch finally abandons the position of his 1901 book, to the consternation of the editor of that essay. This kind of Historicism—the view that history relativizes all revelations and religions, exposing them as a product of historically conditioned, particular, time-bound cultural matrices, and not universal, timeless, and perfect disclosures from on high—occupied Troeltsch in his last years, and his last thoughts on the subject appeared in volume one of his unfinished Historicism and its Problems (Historismus und Seine Probleme). This radical descent into relativism is what led Karl Barth (1889-1968), the greatest 20th century Protestant theologian, to say that if he were convinced that the development of the Reformation (Luther and Calvin) led to Schleiermacher and Troeltsch, he would consider becoming a Roman Catholic. And in his monumental Church Dogmatics (1932-1968), Barth attacks religious relativism explicitly and reaffirms the absoluteness of the Christian revelation and of Jesus Christ. Roman Catholicism, despite the strongly ecumenical stance of Vatican II (early 1960s), has with Pope John Paul II reasserted the “salvific uniqueness and universality” of the Catholic Church and Jesus Christ. The Dogmatic method refuses to go gently into that good night (to paraphrase Dylan Thomas).

Developments after 1860 will be treated in Part II of this handout.

� By external Hegel means, for example, the kind of description of Jesus we find in the gospels, where the disciples are living with Jesus, walking and eating with him, going from one place to another; and then after he dies and rises from the dead, rising into heaven in a cloud and telling them he is coming back to establish the kingdom (the kingdom of God? The Davidic kingdom, or “kingship,” as in the restoration of the Davidic dynasty? [Acts 1:6]). Hegel thinks this “external” history does not capture but rather hides the true meaning (message, content) of Christianity and as such is irrelevant to the truth of Christianity. As John 6:44 says, a passage very meaningful to Hegel, “flesh and blood” cannot reveal to us who Jesus is but only the Spirit of God. This truth has nothing to do with Jesus’ physical resurrection and ascent to heaven, where he is sitting on a throne, and from whence he will return to restore the Davidic dynasty and rule the world (or Israel) from Jerusalem. This description or representational of the meaning of Christianity is superficial in the worst sense of the word: it focuses on the merely physical or exterior aspect of the message, which entirely misses the deeper significance of Jesus’ message and truth, which only thought (philosophy) can retrieve. To insist on the mythical or representational meaning of Christianity is to doom it to refutation by historical criticism.

� Herman Bavinck, “The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl” (1898), in The Bavinck Review 3 (2012): 123–63.

� Bavinck, “Theology of Ritschl.”

� Bavinck, “Theology of Ritschl.”

� Ritschl, The Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (205), quoted in Bavinck,

� For the Social Gospel, see the American theologians, Washington Gladden, “The Fatherhood of God” (1899); Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), and A Theology of the Social Gospel (1917); Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of an Tamed Cynic (1929); Arthur C. McGiffert, “The Kingdom of God” (1909); William Adams Brown, The Essence of Christianity (1906). Quite independently of Troeltsch, and no doubt under the pressure exerted on the social questions of the day by the communist-socialist movement, the Catholic church had also begun, since 1891, to articulate its own concerns with the social issues of the day in Leo XIII’s Papal Encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

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