AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT SINCE KANT

BY

EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE

PARKMAN PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1912

TO ADOLF HARNACK ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY BY HIS FIRST AMERICAN PUPIL

PREFATORY NOTE

It is hoped that this book may serve as an outline for a larger work, in which the Judgments here expressed may be supported in detail. Especially, the author desires to treat the literature of the social question and of the modernist movement with a fulness which has not been possible within the limits of this sketch. The philosophy of religion and the history of religions should have place, as also that estimate of the essence of Christianity which is suggested by the contact of Christianity with the living religions of the Orient.

PASQUE ISLAND, MASS., _July_ 28, 1911.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

A. INTRODUCTION. 1. B. THE BACKGROUND. 23. DEISM. 23. RATIONALISM. 25. PIETISM. 30. AESTHETIC IDEALISM. 33.

CHAPTER II

IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 39. KANT. 39. FICHTE. 55. SCHELLING. 60. HEGEL. 66.

CHAPTER III

THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION. 74. SCHLEIERMACHER. 74. RITSCHL AND THE RITSCHLIANS. 89

CHAPTER IV

THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT. 110. STRAUSS. 114. BAUR. 118. THE CANON. 123. THE LIFE OF JESUS. 127. THE OLD TESTAMENT. 130. THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE. 136. HARNACK. 140.

CHAPTER V

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE SCIENCES. 151. POSITIVISM. 156. NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM. 162. EVOLUTION. 170. MIRACLES. 175. THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. 176.

CHAPTER VI

THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES; ACTION AND REACTION. 191. THE POETS. 195. COLERIDGE. 197. THE ORIEL SCHOOL. 199. ERSINE AND CAMPBELL. 201. MAURICE. 204. CHANNING. 205. BUSHNELL. 207. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL. 211. THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 212. NEWMAN. 214. MODERNISM. 221. ROBERTSON. 223. PHILLIPS BROOKS. 224. THE BROAD CHURCH. 224. CARLYLE. 228. EMERSON. 230. ARNOLD. 232. MARTINEAU. 234. JAMES. 238.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. 243.

CHAPTER I

A. INTRODUCTION

The Protestant Reformation marked an era both in life and thought for the modern world. It ushered in a revolution in Europe. It established distinctions and initiated tendencies which are still significant. These distinctions have been significant not for Europe alone. They have had influence also upon those continents which since the Reformation have come under the dominion of Europeans. Yet few would now regard the Reformation as epoch-making in the sense in which that pre-eminence has been claimed. No one now esteems that it separates the modern from the mediaeval and ancient world in the manner once supposed. The perspective of history makes it evident that large areas of life and thought remained then untouched by the new spirit. Assumptions which had their origin in feudal or even in classical culture continued unquestioned. More than this, impulses in rational life and in the interpretation of religion, which showed themselves with clearness in one and another of the reformers themselves, were lost sight of, if not actually repudiated, by their successors. It is possible to view many things in the intellectual and religious life of the nineteenth century, even some which Protestants have passionately reprobated, as but the taking up again of clues which the reformers had let fall, the carrying out of purposes of their movement which were partly hidden from themselves.

Table of contents (by pages)

• 1: An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Sin
• 2: Which once seemed possible to Renaissance and Reformation
• 3: A philosophising of which religion was
• 4: But their identification with Christianity
• 5: Men have confounded doctrine and dogma
• 6: Religion is an historical phenomenon
• 7: Der Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft
• 8: As a radical and revolutionary influence among the unlearned
• 9: Was Coleridge with his Aids to Reflection
• 10: Channing reminds one often of Schleiermacher
• 11: And again of the Encyclical of 1907
• 12: Of religious habit and practice
• 13: The deistical movement was not really defeated
• 14: The antagonism to ecclesiastical and theological authority
• 15: Utilitarian morality interested men
• 16: It was pantheistic mystical with Spinoza
• 17: Pietism Allusion has been made to pietism
• 18: AEsthetic Idealism Besides pietism
• 19: Rationalism had starved the soul
• 20: Seemed to Herder grossly exaggerated
• 21: Completed the dissolution of the old rationalism
• 22: He died in Koenigsberg in 1804
• 23: But primarily through the will
• 24: It had gone back to the old scholastic position
• 25: Kant departed from this radically
• 26: A survival of the ancient dualism
• 27: This is what Kant really means by the categorical imperative
• 28: Kant never frankly took that step
• 29: In the form in which Kant puts it
• 30: To Kant salvation was character
• 31: Kant had said that the primary condition
• 32: Indwelling in us and making us what we are
• 33: Fichte was a man of high moral enthusiasm
• 34: At twenty three he was extraordinarius at Jena
• 35: Schelling set forth the oneness of God and nature
• 36: When with the advance of reflexion these spirits
• 37: In striking contrast with Schelling
• 38: Hegel rejoiced to find himself able
• 39: Hegel was right in what he said concerning these
• 40: If God is by definition other than man
• 41: Hegel was before all things an intellectualist
• 42: SCHLEIERMACHER Between Kant and Hegel came another
• 43: Among the greatest had been Schleiermacher himself
• 44: The sentiment of fellowship with God
• 45: Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic
• 46: The content of this consciousness
• 47: Would have been utterly impossible to Schleiermacher
• 48: But unnecessary to Schleiermacher himself
• 49: The influence of Hegel was greatest upon Biedermann
• 50: It was called the theory of the kenosis
• 51: That is a religious value judgment
• 52: But information about God and the transcendental
• 53: It was protested against most radically by Kant
• 54: The familiar topic of justification
• 55: Ritschl was bred in the Tuebingen school
• 56: As the Ritschlians understand it
• 57: Herrmann candidly faces this question
• 58: Growingly clearer knowledge of that will
• 59: Redemption and reconciliation have
• 60: The crass objective dogma of Anselm prevailed
• 61: It cannot be called punishment since punishment is immanent
• 62: The antithesis to reason is not faith
• 63: If it were to retain its character as document of revelation
• 64: These contain the most important Scripture narrative
• 65: He studied in Tuebingen and in Berlin
• 66: Ullmann says with cogency that
• 67: Die Christliche Lehre von der Vereoehnung
• 68: Baur had the kind of ear which hears grass grow
• 69: Harnack's Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur
• 70: They alleged apostolic authorship
• 71: Baur had more than an inkling of the true state of things
• 72: His Untersuchungen ueber die evangelische Geschichte
• 73: The Old Testament became a Christian book
• 74: Wilhelm Vatke published his Religion des Alten Testaments
• 75: The centralisation of worship at one point
• 76: Baur was himself a great investigator
• 77: The old delineators were before the age of investigation
• 78: Christianity did not fall back into Judaism
• 79: Die Geschichte der alt christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius
• 80: Its dogma was the Hellenisation of its thought
• 81: Are rather underrated than overstated
• 82: But Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment
• 83: Reflexion wears itself out upon the insoluble difficulty
• 84: The sense that salvation is inward
• 85: After positivism was buried and agnosticism dead
• 86: Positivism was bitterly hostile to Christianity
• 87: Appeared between the years 1830 and 1842
• 88: Comte infers that because we can know
• 89: In this study of history and sociology
• 90: Altruism takes the place of devotion
• 91: Agnosticism for obvious reasons could be no system
• 92: That the effort of the agnostic contention has been great
• 93: And basis of all that is relative and phenomenal
• 94: Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley
• 95: We had supposed that this was anthropomorphism
• 96: And the vapour clouds that had previously evaporated
• 97: Huxley has place for suffering
• 98: Benjamin Kidd in his Social Evolution
• 99: Of the unbroken connexion of nature
• 100: The narratives of miracles are
• 101: A connexion in nature in which
• 102: Some superstition and even deception
• 103: These inequalities must be done away
• 104: His Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion
• 105: The question of the individual
• 106: If it produces worthless individuals
• 107: Leadership has been largely with the Germans
• 108: Early in the nineteenth century
• 109: Less probability of theological reconstruction
• 110: What Coleridge might have done in this field
• 111: But a keen interpreter of spiritual facts
• 112: The school was called from its liberalism the Noetic school
• 113: Mediaeval Catholic theology and scholastic Protestantism
• 114: Spent partly in enforced retirement after 1831
• 115: One may speak briefly of Maurice
• 116: BUSHNELL A very different man was Horace Bushnell
• 117: This Bushnell mightily affirmed
• 118: The political revolt of the eighteenth
• 119: NEWMAN John Henry Newman was born in 1801
• 120: Froude brought Newman and Keble together
• 121: Scepticism supplies its motives
• 122: They cannot be uncatholic in spirit
• 123: The purpose is with Newman entirely polemical
• 124: He reacted violently against his evangelicalism
• 125: Still less was it that of the Tractarians
• 126: Carlyle was destined for the Church
• 127: But what one may call the religious benefit of pantheism
• 128: He inherited qualities of self reliance
• 129: ARNOLD What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself
• 130: The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock
• 131: And his Studies in Religion and Theology
• 132: His Hegelianism and Personality
• 133: Remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable
• 134: Geschichte der neueren Philosophie
• 135: Geschichte der Protestantischen Dogmatik
• 136: Life and Letters of James Martineau