Movements of theological thought in modern Germany

On the pages of our magazine we have already repeatedly pointed out the theological movements that are taking place in modern Germany. These phenomena cannot but interest us, because until recently our theological science was strongly influenced by German scientific and theological literature and, to one degree or another, reflected the fluctuations taking place in Germany. And these fluctuations are very significant, and they fully reveal the entire instability of theological thought when it does not have a firm foothold in the immutable authority of the Church. Beginning from the very time when the German reformer, having rejected the authority of the Roman Church, did not find for himself any other point of support other than his personal conviction, that theological ferment began, which characterizes the church-religious thought of the Protestant world in general and Germany in particular, and this ferment, developing more and more, finally led to a complete crisis, in which the dividing line between where faith ends and where unbelief begins was lost. Lacking a firm foothold in the generally recognized authority of the Church, German orthodoxy struggles in vain with religious freethinking, trying to contain it within the confines of its self-created and therefore not binding formulas and prescriptions, and theological individualism freely violates them, seeking satisfaction in the wide area of ​​free thinking, where the only binding law is a logical conclusion from given premises. And it is extremely instructive to observe what German theological thought has finally come to, following precisely this law of its internal development, and how this instability of theological thought is reflected in the actual life of modern Germany. The proposed article has as its goal to trace the process of development of German theological thought in our century, to indicate the main trends in it and shed light on the confusion of concepts from which even strong theological minds try in vain to break out, and then to clarify the disastrous influence of this confusion of ideas in the actual church-religious life of the people 1 . A few months before the onset of the 19th century, a small book, in 5 chapters, entitled “Speeches on Religion to the Educated Among Its Despisers” 2 appeared in Berlin. It soon turned out that the author of this book was Schleiermacher - and for almost a whole century he has dominated the minds of Protestant Germany. Entire generations were brought up on his speculations, and very, very many still live by his views. Those who are frightened by his pantheism are captivated by his religious feeling; even if someone does not follow him in all his conclusions, he still bows before his all-captivating feeling. His philosophy is perhaps subject to reservations; but at the same time, one cannot help but see in him a man of high, serious piety, a kind of prophet to whom everyone involuntarily obeys. What is his teaching and in what direction does it go? The essence of Schleiermacher's teaching comes close to pantheism. The absorption of the finite in the infinite, the individual as a whole, the human personality in this boundless creative work that is the universe - this is the essence of pantheism. The same being, which, considered in its diversity, is called the universe, is called one God, when considered in its unity. Every person is, as it were, a manifestation of this single essence. Every person perceives and reflects in himself the movements of this universal being. Hence, the feeling of man’s unconditional dependence in relation to the universe and the feeling of his unconditional dependence in relation to God come down to the same impression: pantheistic philosophy leads to the first feeling, and as for the second, it is the best definition that Schleiermacher could give to religion. Luther also set out to put man in a personal relationship with God. And so Schleiermacher, from a pantheistic point of view, renews and realizes this goal of his. Religion, according to him, is an inner feeling of contact with God. It resides not in books, much less in legends, but in our hearts. Faith in Christ does not depend either on miracles, or on prophecies, or on inspiration - all these minor details from which the old schools argued. It is the faith of experience. There is a Christian community which, having been established, strengthened and sustained by long collective experience, is the exponent of the moral and religious heights of Christ; this experience is faith. It, with minor exceptions, has nothing in common with the metaphysical constructions of the notorious “natural religion”; at the same time, it is even less dependent on various fragments of revelation preached by the external church: in faith, as Schleiermacher understands it, there is nothing slavish, much less fragmentary. The Christian community is constantly under the impression that man must live an endless life, that in this respect Jesus Christ was a significant prototype, that in Him self-consciousness, having triumphed over the flesh, was determined by the consciousness of God, and that Jesus Christ, thanks to this miracle, was truly the Redeemer. This fact of redemption becomes the point of departure for all theologians. Thus, faith neither presupposes nor causes determinations; she creates theology without at all submitting to its formulas; all that remains for theology is to register the empirical data of faith. The perfect Christian, who can best self-observe, will also be the most perfect theologian. Schleiermacher's definition of religion aroused certain ridicule from Hegel. “A dog is the most dependent of creatures,” he objected, “does it follow from this that it is also the most religious of all?” - But Hegel, in turn, was seduced by the compromise between Christianity and paganism. Religion, according to him, is the consciousness that God has about himself in infinite existence; but Hegel does not place this consciousness in the inner region of the senses, as Schleiermacher did; he transfers it to the highest realm of thought, however, classifying it in the second category, because religious dogmas are only images, ideas, symbols (Vorstellungen), nothing more than approximate images, and, moreover, too concrete to be completely pure and clear. Further and higher, their Hegelian thought goes back to the idea, the concept (Begriff). But, in general, Christianity and Hegelianism have the same content and differ in form. Everything is in everything: pantheism, in its application to Protestantism, had the significant merit that it was an agent of fusion and unification, or at least gave for a time an illusion in this respect. Bruno Bauer was a Hegelian as long as he proved by deduction the miraculous birth of Christ; Hegelian also, when he dared to go as far as the most sacrilegious denials. And if it was possible for one and the same thinker, in various fluctuations of his consciousness, to constantly refer to the same Hegel, then there is nothing to be surprised that German Protestantism for a certain period admired Hegelianism, this, in the words of Strauss, “the child of peace and promises.” “Everyone was counting,” continues Strauss, “on a new order of things, when wolves would live together with lambs and leopards with goats. The wisdom of the world is this furious she-wolf... - humbly submitted to baptism and made a confession of the Christian faith, while faith, for its part, did not hesitate to give her a certificate of perfect orthodoxy and recommended that society give her the most favorable reception” 3. And from this source of Schleiermacher’s religiosity, corrected by conscious or unconscious Hegelianism, various theological currents emanate and are still nourished: the liberal current, the new Orthodox and the current of the so-called golden mean, or in-between. For "liberals" it seems that theology is nothing more than an imperfect, rough sketch of higher philosophy, and that the world of religious thought is like a kind of Plato's cave, where dogmas like images and shadows change and produce certain abstract concepts. Biederman, Lipsius and M. Pfleiderer belong to this school, although each of them in other respects has his own special method and his own symbolism, and their theology is subordinated to their personal philosophy. When they begin to be accused of irreligion, they respond by borrowing from Schleiermacher arguments in favor of the fact that theology is not a religion. But in turn, the religious, positive, orthodox school - in a word, the school of believers, no matter what epithet it is called, also cites in its favor Schleiermacher's theory about the experience of the Christian community: are not the old, traditional beliefs confirmed by this experience? Do not dogmatic teachings represent the mental capital of this community? Against the fragmentation allowed by liberals, which allows each theologian to interpret religion according to his own personal symbolism, one can oppose those passages from Schleiermacher in which he talks about the role of the Christian community in the creation of faith. What he says about the essence of religious feeling, it is true, seems to lean in favor of the “liberals”; but he has many pages about religious truth, the empirical and concrete expression of this feeling, which believers can easily use. The latter, however, will act wisely if they do not try, in addition, to benefit themselves from Schleiermacher’s dogma, because about the deity of Christ, as well as about the Holy Trinity, he makes several comments with which the faithful would find it difficult to agree. As for the party of the golden mean, or the intermediate party (Vermittlungspartei, Mittelpartei), it fully deserves such a name in two respects. First, being a group of sectarians rather than believers, it always worked diligently to unite Protestantism against Roman Catholicism and, as a unifying motto in this enterprise, willingly used the famous antithesis that Schleiermacher defines the difference between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism: “Whereas Catholicism makes the individual’s relationship to Christ dependent on his relationship to the church, Protestantism makes the individual’s relationship to the church dependent on his relationship to the Church.” Christ." Secondly, members of the “middle party”, partly more apologists than dogmatists, often talk about a compromise between theology and philosophy. They turn to history, to sacred books, to legends and find there a certain number of religious concepts - and this is the first step; at this point the concept is not yet a teaching (Lehre). But the teaching becomes an impression (Eindruck), which, they claim, forms part of the religious experience of the community (Erfahrung); it thus acquires the rights of certainty, although still subjective: this is the second stage. Schleiermacher stopped at this stage, demanding nothing from his believers other than the assimilation of Christ’s teaching through their personal experience. Meanwhile, relying on Hegelianism, representatives of this school go even further and try to prove that this subjective certainty must become objective certainty for philosophical thought; they assume that there is an idea or concept (Begrift) hidden behind this teaching. Such are the religious ideas, often complex and confusing, of the school headed by Nietzsche, Dorner and M. Beischlag. Thus, all these different schools found in Schleiermacher - not let's say their legal father, but at least their breadwinner; they are entirely nourished by it, although at the same time Schleiermacher taught them to recognize the independence and originality of religion in the soul of every believer. Even when, with illogical timidity, they reject Schleiermacher’s theological interpretations and concepts, he remains for them the teacher who for the first time fully developed and exhausted the very principle of the Reformation. Directly on the very road along which he was walking, they saw Luther. To move from Luther to Schleiermacher, there is no need at all to leave the road along which the Reformation went, and this road did not even fork. Logic itself led in this direction: between the soul of the believer and God, Luther destroyed all authority and eliminated all human institutions; Schleiermacher went further along this road and, in turn, eliminated other obstacles, such as revealed canons and external dogmas. He simply deduces dogma from the very fact of Christian piety and sows in all schools the same, very broad, albeit vague, idea that religion is not constituted by dogmas, but simply by religious or pious people themselves. One has only to transfer this idea to the field of exegesis - and the whole picture of life and the religious worldview changes to an extraordinary degree. This especially affected the relationship of theology to biblical history. The biblical narratives tell an accurate story, and that story relates to the supernatural order—those were the two main ideas of positive theology. Rationalism challenged, or at least limited, the second position, although it respected the first. For him it was enough, so to speak, to clear the contents of the sacred books. As for the content itself, it did not concern him; he triumphed when he managed to find a natural explanation for some event described in the Bible, even more incredible than the very hypothesis of miracles with which the believers were satisfied. But to study the Bible itself, the composition of the books and the various tendencies contained in them, the state of the text, the time to which they can be attributed, the value of historical documents that must be recognized for them, the alterations and insertions to which they could be subjected - for all this rationalism, with a few exceptions, had neither competence, nor taste, nor even, perhaps, sufficient sense. But in 1835, David Strauss overcame all these difficulties in one leap. Leaving aside the theologians who lost their work, their ink, and often their faith in reasoning regarding the amount of supernatural that should have been preserved in the Gospel, Strauss bluntly declared that the Gospel stories are myths. Luther wanted to present them as purely the work of God, standing above all commentary and traditions of human origin; and Strauss, coming from the very church of Luther, sought and found in these books only the work of people. He saw in them the products of a folk Christian legend: the source of this legend, in his opinion, was the very aspirations and aspirations of the primitive Christian community to glorify their Founder and the need they felt to see the implementation of messianic ideas. It is clear that cries of indignation and reproach arose against Strauss; but the Reformation, by its very essence, should be hospitable to all kinds of religious views, and therefore there was no sufficient reason to block access to a new trend in the field of religious research, no matter how destructive it might be. Based solely on the Bible, in which Luther saw the seal of God, the Reformation could not exclude the teachings of Strauss, which was covered with the same seal. Until then, rationalists spared these biblical monuments, although they multiplied the number of entrances for the penetration of the poison of doubt; the very stronghold of the Bible, as a divinely inspired book, however, remained inviolable. Strauss for the first time picked up a spade and began to destroy this stronghold. Strauss was almost exclusively a destroyer. Rarely have biographers sketched the figure of their hero with greater vagueness and fluency. No matter how much anyone believes in Jesus Christ, Strauss leaves his reader unsatisfied: the personality he portrays before us does not have vital integrity within himself. Boldly tearing apart the sacred cloth on which believers contemplated the divine face of their Lord, Strauss does not yet know how his successors, without restoring the cloth, will be able to restore the face itself. Under the blows of his criticism, the boards and face are destroyed and disappear. In addition, the origin of the New Testament, as he imagines it, still makes it possible to understand, if you like, the features common to the various Gospels, but it is by no means sufficient to explain those special features in which they differ from each other. Christian Baur tried to fill this gap with the Tübingen school. To the negative results of Strauss's exegesis, Baur, using in other cases the example of freedom set by the teacher, tried to add a positive explanation of the historical development of the ancient Church. He thought to find it in his famous distinction between two movements: the Eionian, or Jewish, movement, and the Pavlovian movement, into which the first Christians were divided. Like Strauss in the Gospels, so he sought human inspiration everywhere; but he achieved this by classifying the Gospels among the ordinary literature of the first centuries, although the people whom he put forward were no longer mere creatures of myth, but historical beings, well-defined personalities who had their passions, were carried away by tendencies, formed parties, and who in modern writings left traces of their passions, the expression of their tendencies, the apology of their parties. Baur's conclusions are now abandoned or obsolete; but for a whole generation this bold experiment seemed like a gift of high learning, and the spirit of these studies has survived to this day. To what extent is divine inspiration inherent in the sacred books? - this is the question that theologians before Strauss and Baur struggled to resolve. They modified the nature and very data of this dispute, trying to show that in the sacred books there was only one inspiration of the primitive Christian community - according to Strauss's so far simple criticism - and the inspiration of various groups and communities - according to the more complex and more refined criticism of Baur. Between Schleiermacher, on the one hand, and Baur, on the other, one cannot help but notice a certain parallel. “Religion is the religious feeling of people,” said the philosopher, and soon a historian appears who declares that religious documents, considered to contain the highest revelation, in fact express only the feelings of former religious people and that the dogmas themselves are products of different eras - a necessary phase of Christian consciousness. And just as religion for the enlightened Protestants of the 19th century is nothing more than the subjectivism that develops Christianity, so this Christianity itself is nothing more than the subjectivism of its distant ancestors. If religion is nothing more than a fact of individual or collective conscience, then the history of religion will simply be the history of the development of religious consciousness. By this standard, in turn, the narratives of the Old Testament are measured. At the beginning of our century, impious and pious people spent their time on grammar and archaeology, even getting carried away with the literary criticism of the Old Testament - by which the former tried to avoid the trouble of appearing as unbelievers, and the latter achieved that they were considered scholars at the same time as they were believers. But biblical history only developed into a science over time. It has been noted that the Old Testament in its narratives subverts or contradicts the concepts of psychology about the religious evolution of peoples. But in the light of this psychology they began to judge him and make corrections in him. The miracle, in itself supposedly impossible and inconceivable, consisted (according to the interpretation of the Tübingen people) not so much in the fact that Joshua stops the sun or that the Red Sea swallows up the Pharaoh, but in the very unexpectedness of the appearance of Moses at a time when the religious state of the Jewish tribe, apparently, was still too primitive. From the original point of view of Vatke, Graf, Reyes, Wellhausen and Stade, it was postulated that the sudden appearance of such a theocratic legislator as Moses was contrary to all probability, that is, to the empirically recognized laws of the religious history of peoples. But one cannot help but notice that from this postulate flows another, which is that the Jewish religion is a product of the Jewish people, the result of Jewish history. They look at it a priori as if it were not a divinely revealed fact, external, standing above Israel: it is the work of the genius of Israel itself. And Israel could not create a religion for itself exactly as described in the books of the Old Testament, because it is not a people in which religious consciousness could awaken and develop in this way. Hence the hypotheses about the books of the Bible, the time of their origin, their sequence, and the tricks of their compilers. Far leaving behind the old criticism, which, still trembling for its extreme courage, tried only little by little to eliminate supernatural details from the history of the people of God, now criticism began to relegate to the realm of the incredible the very foundations of this history, which was brought down directly to the same level as the history of other peoples - with the addition perhaps of the idea of ​​messianism peculiar to this people. Thus, now it is no longer in the name of rational and philosophical improbability that dogmas are wavered, but they are destroyed in the name of historical or empirical improbability. However, this is not surprising: as philosophical thought destroyed the mind’s self-confidence, the very criterion of negation had to change. When a German theologian seeks out and points out “historical improbability,” he expresses only his personal impression and pronounces a judgment according to his personal understanding, which often, of course, differs from the understanding of other theologians. “This could not have happened” - this is how Protestant criticism of this kind is usually expressed and rests on this completely arbitrary statement, as if man with his limited understanding is the full measure of all things. Adolf Harnack went especially far in this type of work, leaving behind himself and his teacher. His scholarship is enormous, his research bears traces of impartiality, his authority as a historian is undeniable. But one has only to look at him as a theologian - and the picture changes. In order to judge the dogmas, the origin of which he examines, for this he needed a special criterion, which he borrows not from the reasoning of reason; he seeks it and finds it in the gospel of Jesus Christ. But “the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he argues, what is it really? A new criterion is needed in order to distinguish among the chaos of exegesis what has authority and what does not deserve any attention. And since it is impossible to always move from criterion to criterion ad infinitum, since it is necessary to find a solid supporting point and since we must find this point in ourselves, if it is not provided to us by some kind of religious authority, then Harnack decisively defines the “gospel of Jesus Christ” according to the idea that Christianity has about it; he identifies this idea with the one that Jesus Christ himself had to personally formulate for himself. The newest “biographies of Jesus,” published by German theologians, have as their goal to clarify the religious consciousness of the individual, what they call das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu. Grau and Baldensperger define this consciousness very differently. When you read one or another of them, you can succumb to the illusion that you really know Christ, and Baldensperger especially shows a lot of learning and subtlety in this regard. However, we should not read them one after the other, if we do not want, having compared their two Jesuses, to come to the conclusion that Christ has now become for learned Germany the same as he was for the Athenians in the time of the Apostle Paul, that is, “the unknown God”... In the origin of this subjective evolution, which we have identified in two areas: speculative theology and religious history, we have discerned the influence of pantheism. Albert Ritschl in the last quarter of this century accelerated this evolution, although he completely escaped its influence. His teaching is extremely confused; it is even said that in order to make his teaching more confusing, he consciously and deliberately resorted to the most obscure methods of expression, as a kind of theological tactic. Despite this, perhaps even for this reason, we need to dwell on it. That religion is a feeling - this, following Schleiermacher, is also asserted by Ritschl; but if the former meant only man’s relationship with God, then the latter also means man’s relationship with his neighbor and with the whole world; in the first respect, a person is passive, his will is limited, in the second he is active, his will is free. There is an antinomy here, and Ritschl hopes to resolve it with the help of the theory of the kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God, according to him, is “the gathering of believers in Christ, insofar as they act in accordance with the principle of love.” God is love; The kingdom of God, that is, a state where everyone must act on the basis of love, is, therefore, the ultimate goal of God and at the same time the universal moral ideal. This is at the same time the highest work of religion. Representing a necessary tendency of divine love, the kingdom of God is at the same time realized by man; and with this introduction of the human personality Ritschl avoids pantheism. He differs from Schleiermacher in another respect - precisely in his view of religious experience, to which Schleiermacher reduces all religion in general. It may happen that even as a member of a community a person does not find in himself an echo of the religious experience of this community, then one thing comes out: either he wants to be pious and in this case is forced to passively reckon with the principles of power, blindly accept what is practically recognized in this community; or the futility of his own religiosity leads him to despondency, and he ceases to be religious. To find in one’s own conscience the echoes of the religious consciousness of a community in order to derive one’s own religion from this is, of course, within the power of some Schleiermacher, but what is a poor spirit to do? Ritschl is thinking of making this task easier for them. He takes Holy Scripture as the starting point of theology, and here (at least so he flatters himself) - the starting point is objectively given, firmly established. But Ritschl immediately falls back into subjectivity: after 50 years of exegetical research, where to look for Scripture itself? He notes in it “parasitic” books that need to be removed, strange ideas that should be eliminated, and in general he adapts it to his doctrine. He recognizes only those books as the source of religion that are read by Ritschl according to the method of Ritschl himself. Holy books act on me in a certain way - this is what determines my faith, this is what establishes my theology; This is exactly the kind of situation that Ritschl’s school comes to! From Schleiermacher to Ritschl, religious individualism passed through a new stage: it was no longer the religious experience of the community, but our personal experience that provided a striking example of such a construction of Christianity, in which neither liberals, nor orthodoxies, nor theologians of a conciliatory trend could no longer recognize this holy teaching. The basis of his theological system is “justification” and “redemption”, and these two words are the title of Ritschl’s main work 4 . Of course, they belong to the ordinary vocabulary of theology, but if we pay attention to the fact that the author does not admit original sin, we will immediately see the originality of his work and his system, which, while preserving ordinary expressions, however, reject the dogmas contained in them. A few examples will suffice to show how Ritschl theologizes. “Is Christ the son of God?” “Yes,” replies Ritschl (because he generally avoids direct refutation of traditional solutions to theological questions). But listen to his explanation: “Jesus, without any doubt, felt a religious relationship with God of a completely new kind; He communicated this novelty to his students; all members of the Christian community must maintain the same attitude towards God that Christ had towards him.” In simple terms, this means that Jesus is the son of God, but at the same time, of course, this is a sonship that we should imitate. If we persistently ask Ritschl: “So Christ is God?” - then he, of course, answers yes, but in order to understand this answer, you need to read the following from him: “The predicate of the divinity of Christ contains two of His qualities: the perfect revealer of God and the social prototype of the spiritual dominion exercised over the world.” Confused by this darkness, you ask the opposite question: “Then is Christ a simple man?” And Ritschl vaguely replies: “To be simply a man (ein blosser Mensch) means to be a man considered as a natural quantity, abstracting all the signs of a spiritual and moral personality. I do not even consider my enemies to be ordinary people, because they have a certain upbringing and moral character. Moreover, I, considering Christ the bearer of the revelation of God, do not consider Him a simple man.” In order not to despair from these vague explanations, you try to understand the matter from the other side. “Does Christianity,” you ask him, “come from divine Revelation?” “Yes, of course,” Ritschl answers and then continues: “Speaking of the revelation of God, we mean special sources of the general concept of the world, which is the conviction of religious communities, and from here comes the same mentality, the same orientation of spontaneity in a large number of people.” Since this seems far from clear to you, you move on to miracles and ask: “What is the significance of miracles?” Ritschl defines his attitude towards them as follows: “The religious concept of the world is based on the fact that all natural events are at the disposal of God when He wants to help people. Consequently, miracles can be considered (gelten als Wunder) such unusual phenomena to which the fact of special help of divine grace is attributed and which therefore can be considered as special signs of God’s favor for believers.” But you continue to insist and, due to the lack of clear definitions, demand further explanations. How is Jesus God? How is Revelation divine? How are miracles performed? Ritschl stops you here: the question “how,” he replies, is completely uninteresting for us. What is God in itself, a miracle in itself, Christ in itself, Revelation in itself - what is the importance of this for a religious soul? She has nothing to do with these metaphysical considerations (Seinurtheile); the only thing that matters is what God, Christ, Revelation and miracle are for your soul and for my soul; these concepts have a subjective meaning to you; the judgments with which you can determine their meaning (Werthurteile) - that’s all that matters. Is it consistent with religiosity, is it consistent with true theology to eliminate questions about metaphysical subjects, that is, in a word, not to speak out about the objective reality of Jesus Christ, Revelation and miracle - we, for our part, will not discuss this question here; but positive theology, of course, cannot be satisfied with this vague intricacy, in which there is something painful. One of the most reliable interpreters of this trend, Professor Lemme of Heidelberg, sees here a “new religion” and is indignant that the most elementary, most basic truths are disputed by people who are supposedly defenders of Christianity. The conversation between followers and enemies of Richlianism is short. “You lack frankness,” the latter say. “But you lack meaning,” the first ones say. But in general, Ritschl’s theology is so vague that in reality one can never be sure that his thought is completely understood. But this very obscurity, however, was partly the reason for his success: in a church where individuals stand in religious truth in the most varied respects, it is quite natural to ask whether a theology based on ambiguity and vague sayings may not have some right to be considered a kind of instrument of interpretation and even of edification? “It would be a true blessing of God,” exclaimed one of Ritschl’s students, “if modern theologians, despite the differences in their views, firmly adhered to the language of the Bible and the Reformation. Anyone who uses this language, even if in the real sense and without understanding it; Anyone who uses the words of this language with a firm and true intention to follow them, considering them the sacred terms of Christianity, as such expressions that cannot be eliminated, even if they mean to him something completely different than to many other people, even if they mean to him something completely unheard of, which no one has yet discovered - every such person does not deserve contempt, but rather deserves gratitude for his piety. This language is a kind of instrument of mutual communication, like an everyday language. He neutralizes many false theological opinions for the soul. We should rejoice that all theologians agree on the same words.” In this tirade of Kattenbusch the spirit of Ritschl is fully expressed and lives in all its purity, and if Ritschlianism is spreading among the Reformed pastors of Germany, it is more because it bears a superficial character than because of its depth; rather because of the convenience that it represents for young unbelieving theologians in preaching to their believing flock a faith that they themselves do not recognize, than because of the horizon that it opens for the elect to penetrate deeper into those fragments of faith that are still preserved among them. “This is a false counterfeit of theology, this is hypocrisy!” - exclaim Protestant orthodoxies. But it would not be entirely fair to Albert Ritschl, as well as to the best of his students, if in judging him we took, so to speak, the point of view of Protestant clericalism. Their biggest fault is that they were born too early. They were the embodiment of the ideas and spirit of the Reformation; but since Protestantism strengthens to support the remaining fragments of the church, thinkers such as Ritschl, consistent in their conclusions, become in conflict with orthodoxy and are excluded by it. Imagine an era when the current that emerged from the Reformation would have received complete freedom, when the fact would have been fully recognized that the church as an authority for theological thought no longer exists: Ritschl would have been his own man at that time, and he would have enjoyed the greater honor because, without a doubt, everyone would be indebted to him for the acceleration of this decisive emancipation of Protestant individualism. “Faith justifies without the works of the law,” says the Apostle Paul. Martin Luther took advantage of this text and became attached to it with all the strength of his religious passion. Acting more as an act of creator than of interpreter, he understood and translated it with the help of an additional word, that a person is justified by faith alone without works, and since the epistle of the Apostle James speaks directly against this, he simply rejected this “straw message” and did so on the principle that the salvation of faith is the cornerstone of the reformation. The subjectivism of Schleiermacher and Ritschl gradually shook this stone: between the “positive” believers and the followers of the “new theology”, this brainchild of Ritschl, there is currently complete disagreement on the question of the very concept of faith. For some, as for others, a certain self-devotion of the soul, confident in the goodness of God, constitutes an integral part of faith: faith is an act of trust (Vertragen). For the “newest school” it is just that, nothing more; for “positive” theology, it presupposes, moreover, a mental attachment to known religious truths, which to one degree or another, directly or indirectly, motivates this trust (Fürwahrhalten). The Augsburg Confession seems to favor the second view; therefore the documents of faith have a twofold object: history and the operation of history, and this in concrete terms means that the believer must adhere to the primary facts of the Christian Revelation and must believe in the remission of sins promised by that Revelation and achieved by the atonement. On the contrary, according to the teachings of the “newest school,” you can blindly, having no prior idea of ​​the person of Jesus Christ, rest in the confidence that you will be saved by Him, and interpret the words “salvation” and “redemption” in your own way; modern theology declares that you are in faith, assures you of it, simply by consulting your heart and without asking about the basis of your confidence. In the life of Jesus Christ, as recounted in the Gospels, this theology especially highlights one important fact, namely, Christ’s participation in the salvation of mankind. All other facts are secondary compared to the first. It divides them into two groups: some are closely related to the work of our redemption, and without them this redemption would not have been accomplished: such are suffering and crucifixion; others are, as it were, a layering of historical legendary additions that no longer attach any significance to the personality of Christ, any reality to his redemptive work: such, for example, is the resurrection. Let faith presuppose a certain confidence in the facts of the first group; As for the facts of the second group, then, on the contrary, you don’t have to be interested in them at all. We object to this, of course, that it was the resurrection that convinced the apostles, who were disappointed for a time, that until the end of centuries it would justify the embassy of Christ in the eyes of Christians, that it was precisely one of the proofs of the Christian faith, that it, strictly speaking, was the basis of everything - how can one do without this particular faith? But our amazement will cease if we take into account that there is nothing in common between the faith of positive theology and faith, as the “modern theologians” understand it; the first seeks historical arguments, which it jealously guards, feels the need for apologetics, the foundations of which it contains; the latter, on the contrary, are alien to such concerns. For positive theology, faith presupposes a sum of dogmas that exist outside and stand above believing souls; these dogmas precede them and survive them, i.e. represent an objective entity; regarding the content of this essence, or, better to say, regarding its dimensions, representatives of different religions do not agree with each other, but they agree in recognizing its very existence. For the so-called “newest school,” on the contrary, faith is a simple phenomenon of consciousness, a certain religious orientation of the soul; it is, first of all, something subjective. It would be more correct, from the point of view of this school, to say: “I have my own faith” than to say: “I have faith”; because the varieties of faith are as different as the most believing souls. Faith is acquired in the same way as the consciousness that it already exists; it is not assessed or measured by any external criterion. Whether it presupposes and contains dogmas is, obviously, a private question for it; since even theologians of the same direction differ on this subject, such as Kaftan, the author of the work “Faith and Dogmas,” and Dreyer, the author of the work “Christianity without Dogmas.” These dogmas, in any case, are more likely to be a product of faith or a consequence of faith, than they themselves precede it and cause it; they will be, as it were, the dawn of the believing soul, the individual expression in which its religiosity is clothed. For a positive Protestant, dogma is an exotic truth, emerging from the supernatural realm and naturalized in the soul of every Christian, composed by it and arousing faith in it; but for the “newest school,” on the contrary, the soul of a believer is no longer a passive recipient of dogmas, is not a city of adoption, but is a true and natural fatherland; it does not simply give refuge to faith, but creates it; just as it has its own faith, so it has its own dogmas, which it produces and develops; and so understood dogmas, far from being an obstacle to the freedom of the soul, are, on the contrary, the result and expression of this freedom. Between these two concepts of faith - positive and “newest” - well-intentioned people try to establish a certain connection; but these very attempts, doomed to failure, testify with particular clarity to the immeasurable antagonism between them. Some theologians, like Greiswald University professor Kremer, express the hope that young unbelieving pastors, as they progress in the faith, will express their personal beliefs more accurately in certain terms of traditional formulas. Whole acceptance of the old symbol would thus be the ideal crown of the religious evolution of the soul; rejected at the starting point, this symbol would be accepted again at the point of achieving the goal; it would be, as it were, a common channel where the connection would be restored between the humble and stable faith of positive theology and the religiosity of the “newest” school, freely returning to the same thing from which it shied away at the beginning. The followers of the “newest school” mock this prophecy as pious naivety. Scoffing at “positive” theology, they see in it only a kind of shield, behind which the pastor, despite his unbelief, can enter into an agreement with his believing flock or avoid clashes with the “positive” consistory; but that the very nature of his religiosity and the intensity of his faith should gradually induce this pastor to bow before the orthodox Catechism - this seems to them an amusing and deceptive illusion. They treat the positive faith associated with a certain “symbol” of faith with the same apparent respect that Juvenal prescribed in relation to children: puere debetur reverentia. In the name of freedom of conscience, in the name of respect for old minds accustomed to certain forms of cult, they allow the appearance of faith with all its external expressions and allow the weak to find consolation in these outdated elements. But the champions of modern theology represent the mature age of the Protestant faith; they have a mind free enough, a soul devoted enough to the divine, to experience, as it were, the presence of the very person of Christ in their soul. What does it matter after this, whether Christ be God or man? The very feeling of His presence is their whole faith. “To believe in God means: I am internally confident in God, I live in Him and through Him I conquer the world. Believing in Jesus Christ means: I went through the whole world, sought God and found Him in Jesus Christ.” Their faith is a fact of experience, the result of testing their own soul, or even better, the result of a well-known quest. With calm arrogance they reject all reproaches to them from positive theology. They are accused of denying the deity of I. Christ - “In vain!” - they answer; they recognize the divinity in Christ, and that is enough for them. Instead of learning from others that Christ is God, they learn by their own experience that in the person of Christ the divine ideal is revealed and that for whole centuries it has existed indelibly. A kind of pious sensation gives life to their faith; she fully supports her, always fresh and always uncertain. Instead of reciting the Creed, they engage in mutual messages to each other; their creed takes the form of autobiography; their faith is, as it were, a revelation of the soul; what they have dogmatically takes the form of mutual trust. Orthodox theologians could not help but be indignant at this, since in order to understand the new theology it was necessary that all the most important questions of dogma be answered directly and clearly. “Do you believe that the Bible is a book of inspiration?” The newest theologian answers this question of enormous importance with his characteristic vagueness of expression: “The Bible for me is the word of God, because it speaks to me more clearly in the Bible than anywhere else.” Instead of directly and definitely expressing his opinion, he evasively expresses his impression to us; Instead of factual definitions, he presents his personal experience, stating and telling how the Bible works for him. Of course, orthodox theologians are unhappy with this, since they want a direct answer - yes or no, while the theologian of the newest school gets away with nothing but vagueness. This inevitably leads to controversy; It generally begins with the fact that both of them reproach each other for Roman Catholic tendencies. “Your literary admiration for external and strict dogmas,” the followers of the newest school object to the “positive” theologians, “reveals in you an inclination towards Roman Catholicism, and even,” the polemicists, getting excited, add, “reveals in you the spirit of Jesuitism.” Drawing this parallel, he and Professor Herman point to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, with the sublimity of its mysticism and the poetic grandeur of its liturgy, the importance that it attaches to good deeds, at least moderates and flavors the apparent dryness of its dogmatic exclusivity; Luther reduced all religion to faith, and if the “positives” (theologians of the positive school) reduce faith itself to passive acceptance of it, then wouldn’t one of the fatal consequences of this positive Protestantism be that salvation is bought by slavery and that alone? The positives answer, in turn: “With your subjective processing of faith, for which you bring into play all kinds of historical data and subtle arguments, a religion can emerge only for yourself and your friends. You condemn the rest of humanity to an implicit faith (implicita fides), ignorant and naive, and this is another form of passivity and slavery. To demand a hidden faith from all people - doesn’t this mean acting in the same way as the Roman Church? In addition, you speak ambiguously: your language testifies to educated people the freedom of your thought, but it inspires simple pious people that you share their faith. You live by equivocations, and it is from these Jesuit methods that Luther’s church is dying. Thus, both schools reproach each other for Jesuitism, and this is a poor means of understanding mutual views and only testifies to the sad lack of their internal justification. “If liberalism continues to move in this direction, the last hour will strike for the church,” said one believer pastor from Essen. “The desire for orthodoxy to suppress theological criticism puts religion in danger,” declares one of Harnack’s students in alarm. Each party, therefore, thinks that it is the only one that can save the church. “The phenomenon is painful, the misery is terrible,” is how Professor Beischlag characterizes this mutual struggle between theological schools. But even this judgment is disputed; young theologians of the newest school are distinguished by their enthusiasm and even boastfulness. If there is discord among Luther's followers, then this is all the better in their eyes: this proves that the church lives. “Were there no disputes even at the Council of Jerusalem, some 20 years after the death of Christ?” - they exclaim. Religious unity would be a state of lifelessness; religious diversity is proof of spiritual growth. The hotter the debate becomes, the more the newest school will rejoice at the awakening of religious consciousness in the depths of the Reformation. If the positives deplore these disputes, then it is up to them to stop them; all Protestants can unite in that common conviction that they must support and spread the pure Gospel and fight against Rome. And this ground of unity, which the newest theologians have offered to orthodoxy, is not their own ground? “Addressing us with such an invitation,” the positive people answer, “means presenting us with a demand to lay down our arms.” And so both parties remain fully armed. Meanwhile, to reconcile them with each other, perhaps there remains one more means - namely, a return to the authority of Luther. According to the old Protestant belief, Gottes Wort, Lutheri Lehr Vergehet nun noch nimmermehr. That is, “The Word of God and Luther’s teaching do not pass by.” This couplet is found on the walls of Wittenberg and the Wartburg; it undoubtedly resonates with something Roman Catholic, because it puts Holy Scripture and Tradition, the word of God and the teaching of people on the same level, or, rather, with some strange autocracy, which Luther himself at times was indignant at, it puts the teaching of the word of God next to the teaching of one person - Luther. In our time, the Reformation, by some strange twist of logic, has become more consistent in its principle than the old authors of this couplet were, who continued to honor their ancestor and emancipator in Luther; but she treats him more freely as a teacher. Meanwhile, if theologians already disagree regarding the word of God, then is it possible to turn to the teachings of Luther for the necessary arguments? Meanwhile, this is exactly what various schools do and all draw their arguments from him. After all, in Luther there were two specific people: the theologian and the founder of the church, the thinker and the administrator - a man who refused to be commemorated, and a man who demanded obedience; and from these two “people” in one Luther the different trends originate. He suspected the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles of James and Jude of authenticity, and, taking advantage of the break he made in the canon, modern theology considers itself entitled to expel other biblical books. Luther, in any case, was the forerunner of all subsequent negative movements. But the deep reverence with which he treated the word of God and which was expressed in his enthusiastic pages - does not it justify the pious restraint of positive theology in relation to exeetics? Luther, of course, had no doubt whatsoever about the objective truth of the supernatural; he believed not just with his reason, but also with his imagination: Jesus Christ and Satan were completely definite and real personalities for him. But at the same time he said that miracles and prophecies are signs for the pagans and that “we should glorify great and significant miracles, for Christ daily destroys the power of the devil and ensures the salvation of the soul.” And from here it is immediately clear what benefit a good student of Ritschl can derive from these reflections, what comments he can give to them. Luther can be read and interpreted in so many different ways that it is impossible to play the role of mediator between his various followers: could he ever have foreseen the mass of problems that the Reformation had to deal with three centuries later under the combined influence of Kantian subjectivism and various systems of pantheism? “Jesus answered: for this purpose I was born and came into the world, to testify to the truth... Pilate answered: what is truth? and having said this, he went out again to the Jews.” This is what it says in the Gospel of St. Apostle John. These lines constantly come to mind when reading the works of modern German theologians; they define with inimitable precision the spirit and letter of those negotiations that various Protestant schools conduct among themselves, and all these discussions concern Jesus Christ. What God. The teacher testified to the truth - there is no one among them who would not agree with this, who would not even find a source of edification for himself in this. But “what is truth”? The point here is not simply to decide what its content is and what the main indisputable dogmas it contains are. For a long time, the “disagreements” of Protestant communities concerned only one subject - the degree of length or brevity of their catechism, but now it has a completely different meaning. At present, the question is about the very essence of religious truth. Does this truth exist independently of believers, does it correspond to objective reality, is it inspired from the outside, does it come to us from another world? Or, on the contrary, isn’t it, in the inner conscience of everyone, the fruit of personal consciousness, the result of individual religiosity, the expression and manifestation of inner piety - in a word, isn’t it subjective? It is to these questions that the antagonism between the various schools of Protestant theology in Germany now boils down. Does religious truth come from God or is it developed in each of us? In the first case it is, in the second case it is. In the first case, it threatens to restrict the freedom of science; in the second case, it will depend on the people themselves, as the authors and objects of the religious “phenomenon,” to avoid such danger. In the first assumption, finally, it promises to remain an educational subject, like science itself; in the second, on the contrary, it promises only to arouse feelings and produce affect. Protestant thought in Germany during the course of our century gradually developed in this latter direction. How this direction is reflected in the practical and administrative needs in which the life and activities of various Protestant communities are expressed - this will be discussed next time. See Revue des Deux Mondes Aug 16 and 1 Oct. Art. L'Allemagne religieuse. Comp. Protestantism in its modern position // Christ. reading. 1894. Issue. VI; Crisis in Protestantism // Church Bulletin. No. 50 for 1893, No. 10 for 1895 and other articles. Die Reden über Religion an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. 1799. See Lichtenberg's History of Religious Ideas in Germany. Volume II P. 316. Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versӧhnung 1870–74, in three volumes, 2nd ed. 1882–1883.