Modern Protestantism in its principles and present reality

No one can deny that a significant movement is currently taking place in the West, deeply affecting ecclesiastical and religious life. Both the main heterodox faiths, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, as two extreme opposites, each developing in the direction inherent in its inner essence, clearly came to those extremes that constitute the inevitable result of such development. Roman Catholicism, developing in a direction, so to speak, centripetal, came through a number of stages to the deification of the center - in the person of the infallible papacy, and Protestantism, developing in the opposite - centrifugal direction, in turn inevitably came to the opposite extreme, destroyed all the centers and fragmented into many self-contradictory, irreconcilable and hostile parties, turning from a church into a collection of arbitrary, constantly unstable and fluctuating opinions. This other state is completely abnormal, and the consciousness of this weighs heavily on the religious conscience of the peoples of the heterodox West, who, seeing themselves between two extremes, equally disgusting to the sense of truth and proportion, and not finding a way out of them, are restless and worried, often falling into even greater extremes - complete unbelief and anarchism. The situation is obviously sad, but it would be even more sad if, despite all this, there were no persons in the West at all who, realizing the bleakness of such a situation, would not raise their warning voice and would not point out to the peoples languishing in church-religious error on the path that can lead them to the light of the darkened and distorted truth of Christ, to the gates of the true and immutable Church of God. Such voices, fortunately, are heard quite often, and in very recent times the public opinion of the heterodox West has been occupied by several authoritative voices, one of which belonged to such an experienced statesman and theologian as Gladstone, who spoke with several articles on deeply important issues of modern church-religious life and theological thought. 1 But leaving aside for the time being the voice of the famous elder, we will now introduce our readers to one work that casts a bright light on the state of modern Protestantism, and precisely in Germany, to whose theological opinions the entire Protestant world has hitherto listened. This work belongs to a certain “Orthodox Catholic,” as the anonymous author calls himself, and it deservedly attracted general attention among theologians of both the West and the East, 2 since it not only thoroughly introduces the modern state of Protestantism, but also points out the outcome from the sad situation in the direction of the only saving Church, namely the Catholic Church. For us, this work is all the more interesting in view of the fact that the very reason for its composition was the blasphemous attack of one Protestant professor against the Russian church, which he called “the lowest form of Christianity.” Outraged by this outburst, the author decided to speak out in defense of the Russian Church and at the same time show what German Protestantism is in its principles and current state. And the picture turned out amazing. So, what is modern German Protestantism? When, in the forties of this century, the Zurich villagers drove out of their country David Strauss, whom the liberal government had made an ordinary professor of theology, a cry of indignation arose throughout the Protestant world at the gross intolerance of the Swiss villagers and their spiritual leaders. In vain did the believing pastors try to prove that it was obvious absurdity to allow future ministers of the church and spiritual pastors of the believing rural population to be taught from the pulpit by a known atheist, preaching that the Bible is a collection of fables and the Christian faith is a deception. But their voices had only temporary significance. The very fact of D. Strauss's elevation to the responsible chair of theology clearly testified to what Protestantism was striving and striving for, and now the fruits of this striving are obvious to everyone. The newest Protestant dogmatics is clearly imbued with the spirit that breathed in the writings of the founder of modern rationalism. To prove this, it is enough to point to the latest manuals of Christian dogma by outstanding representatives of modern Protestantism, such as, for example, Biederman and Pfleiderer. Reading them, one cannot help but be surprised at what a terrible decline a religious system can reach, having lost every support point in the authority of the church. Thus, according to Biderman’s teaching, God and the world differ from each other only logically, but are identical in content; the infinite Spirit has His existence only in finite spirits; in every person at all times union with God is realized; “the will of God and the immanent moral world order are identical” (i.e., what has happened as such is already good); There is no immortality, and Biderman presents its denial as a religious postulate. 3 Therefore, there is nothing in “God” that could arouse love, gratitude, trust and hope. Such childish feelings and aspirations, Biderman teaches, do not correspond to the state in the full sense of an enlightened person, who over time recognizes that he loses nothing in them. “Even in the crudest paganism,” Flügel exclaims bitterly, is there not more religion than in this Christian pantheism!” from which providence, redemption and immortality are expelled? But Biderman clearly gives his disciples (the future shepherds of the people) permission to condescend to the “weak in spirit” and talk about God as a person! And his pangeistic monism is even seasoned for Christian etiquette with biblical figures of speech. So in his system we talk about “religion”, about “creation”, “the goodness and wisdom of God”, about “sonship in relation to God”, “communion with God”, redemption, grace, sanctification, eternal bliss, etc.; but all this is only for the “weak in spirit,” since in reality, under the guise of church-dogmatic names and formulas, only purely logical and metaphysical processes and concepts are meant. For example, the view of the identity of God and humanity, if it is perceived by feeling, he calls “redemption”; embraced by the will, this view exercises “the absolute power of the spirit over the flesh,” i.e. "sanctification" To recognize that God exists only as a representation in the spirit and otherwise He does not exist, according to Biderman, means “to be one with God,” to be “in mutual communication of love with God,” to enjoy “grace”; he calls the negation of the finite (the death of the individual) eternal bliss, “eternal life.” 5 Another prominent representative of this trend now dominant in Germany, Pfleiderer, also eliminates all evidence of religious faith. In place of a personal God, he has an impersonal world cause or world soul, in place of deliverance from sin and evil, he preaches submission to the necessary flow of things, the doctrine of immortality in his opinion does not at all relate to religion, etc. 6 To what extent such a doctrine corresponds to the tasks of Christian dogmatics, it is unnecessary to talk about this; it is enough to note that even Hartmann, who sympathizes with pantheists, could not help but notice that “the point of view of such theologians is outside Christianity.” 7 Such unbelief is sad in itself, but what is even sadder is that its preachers do not at all consider it their duty to leave a professorship that is unusual for such a worldview, but continue to proudly be “professors of evangelical theology!” It is not difficult to imagine with what concepts about Christianity and about their future responsibilities those young listeners who then become shepherds of the German people and preachers of the word of God leave the classrooms of such professors. From here it becomes completely understandable that deeply sad fact that now from the church pulpit in Germany every now and then one hears not words of evangelical piety about Christ, but blasphemous speeches that insult Christianity itself, as was the case, for example, recently in Bremen, where the preacher Schwalb directly and openly mocked from the pulpit the idolization of Jesus Christ as superstition. 8 One might think that such results should attract the serious attention of all right-thinking people and awaken in the “professors of evangelical theology” themselves a feeling of shudder at the abyss to which the modern trend threatens to lead. But in reality it is not like that. They do not care about the results of the direction and they continue to assert and insist on unlimited freedom of theology, believing that freedom of doctrine and conscience is one of the most sacred blessings of our time. They stand wholeheartedly for “freedom of research”, not placing any restrictions on it, and look with cold indifference at how this “freedom of research” little by little eliminates from dogma those teachings of the New Testament by which Christianity itself differs from other monotheistic religions, does not even recognize those two main dogmas without which no religion can exist - denies the personality of God and the possibility of hearing prayer, and thereby deprives Protestantism of its right be called a religion at all, bringing it down to the same level as paganism or even lower than it. The Protestant Church, thanks to the principle of unlimited religious tolerance, is completely comparable to paganism in the sense that the latter combines the most opposite extremes: crude fetishism and philosophical Buddhism, the voluptuous and dissolute cult of Baal and morally strict Parsism, etc. Just as paganism in essence does not constitute a known sum of dogmas or, rather, superstitions, but is only the opposite of the three monotheistic religions, so Protestantism, having lost its internal positive content, lives only by irreconcilable hostility towards the Catholic Church, so that everyone is a Protestant who denies Roman Catholicism and the “gloomy Greek Church”, even if he not only did not recognize the deity of Jesus Christ, but even did not believe at all into God. It is remarkable that the “Evangelical Union” also adheres to such views. When several well-meaning people made a statement to him about the need to demand from their fellow members the confession of the so-called Apostolic Creed, he decisively rejected this proposal, although the question of recognizing or not recognizing the incarnation of Christ was closely connected with this. In view of this, it is not at all surprising that a peculiar view is increasingly spreading among Protestants, according to which “Protestantism is by no means the sum of dogmas.” 9 But then, what is he? After all, it is obvious to everyone that a certain spiritual society must have something in common at its core. Liberal Protestants themselves are aware of this, and they try to get out of the difficulty by pointing out that all Protestants are united by, if not the possession of the truth, then the search for it. But if Protestantism openly admits that it does not possess the truth, but only seeks it, then it ceases to be a church and descends to the level of a kind of club, where a certain number of intelligent and ambitious people stand with the torch of their research, before which the mass of the rest must bow in reverent amazement. The leaders of modern Protestantism are not at all embarrassed by this and even themselves claim that indeed “the Protestant Church is a school of philosophers, a great and sacred community of the search for truth!” One might think that Protestantism consists of hundreds of millions of thinkers and thinkers, researchers and explorers. Alas, reality shows something completely different, and the masses of people who contain it, thirsting for any specific faith and not finding in it anything other than vague philosophical opinions and searches for truth, find themselves in the saddest situation and become easy prey for all kinds of agitators and infidels. The Protestant enthusiasm for free religious inquiry stems from a twofold error: firstly, from the confusion of two completely different areas, the area of ​​​​knowledge and objective knowledge with the area of ​​faith and subjective belief, and secondly, from a false view of the limits of the human mind. As for the first point, Protestants believe that real, insured against any contradiction and, moreover, progressive knowledge is possible only in the so-called exact sciences, and since theology does not belong to them, only views and opinions are possible in it that cannot be confirmed by the obvious, i.e. for everyone there are convincing reasons. But the lie of this view lies precisely in the fact that it attributes the same laws of thinking to two completely different areas, applies the same method of research to two areas, each of which has only its own source of knowledge. If in the field of exact sciences everything is based on positive knowledge of facts, then in the field of religion the facts themselves presuppose such a basis, for the comprehension of which another organ of perception is necessary, namely faith. Not to admit this means to sin against the basic principles of scientific methodology. Meanwhile, Protestant theology disdains faith and wants to replace it with knowledge, while accepting as obvious the assumption that the final cause of all things can be fully known and that through the efforts of reason the whole mystery of the world and life can be resolved; in a word, it adheres to a view that is decisively in conflict with the current philosophical worldview of even the positive school. One of the great merits of modern science lies precisely in the clear proof that even reality, that external quality of the world that is accessible to our senses, essentially remains unknowable. “The extreme degree of possibility for us,” admits, for example, Herbert Spencer, “is to interpret the process of things as it appears to our limited consciousness; but how this process relates to the actual process, we are not able to know, much less understand.” And further: “Final scientific ideas are all representatives of realities that cannot be comprehended.” Independently of him, Dubois-Reymond came to the same result, 10 who says: “We think through ideas introduced into our consciousness, through our senses and brain apparatus, and we cannot go further than this. How they relate to the actual qualities of the world in order to know or even guess this, for this our brain does not have any apparatus; therefore we must give it up." Dubois-Raymond further declares that reality has nothing in common either with the present or with any later image of representation, that, despite incessant research, we are as little closer to reality as we cannot catch our shadow. “We don’t even have the proper organ to comprehend reality.” “We cannot scientifically say anything else about reality except that it is contained in space and that movement occurs in it. What kind of space this is and time based on movement, nothing can be determined about this... On the other side of physical existence there is nothing impossible, we are separated from that side by an impenetrable mediastinum. It is possible that nothing exists that we attribute to natural objects.” 11 These thinkers thus, through precise research, confirmed only what Schopenhauer had already guessed, sixty years ago, with the help of brilliant speculation. “No matter what torches we light,” he says, “no matter what space we illuminate, our horizons constantly remain surrounded in the dead of night. After all, the final solution to the riddle of the world must necessarily speak only about things in themselves, and not about phenomena. Meanwhile, these latter are the only ones accessible to our forms of knowledge; these forms have meaning and significance only in relation to the phenomenon: things in themselves and their possible relationships remain inaccessible to comprehension through these forms. Therefore, the real, positive solution to the riddle of the world must be something that the human mind is completely incapable of understanding and thinking about, so that if some being of a higher kind came and took the trouble to bring us this solution, we could not understand anything from his explanations. 12 Thus, even if we do not know the actual properties of things accessible to our senses, but must be content with simple surrogates, then of course there can be no question that we can comprehend, with the help of ordinary methods of natural, experiential-sensory knowledge, the non-sensory cause of all things and solve the great riddle of being. “In all directions,” we will also cite Spencer’s testimony, “the research of a man of science brings him face to face with an unsolved riddle, and he more and more clearly comes to the conviction that this riddle is insoluble. He recognizes at the same time both the greatness and insignificance of the human mind: its strength in relation to everything that is included in the circle of experience, and its powerlessness in relation to everything that surpasses experience. Further, Spencer provides striking evidence in favor of this, from which only one conclusion can follow: in essence, none of the worldviews that exist in general, both irreligious and religious, can be based only on knowledge. If knowledge is insufficient, then, consequently, another weapon is required, and in the religious field it is nothing other than faith. Meanwhile, the whole essence of modern Protestantism lies in the fact that, having lost sight of this truth generally recognized by science, it tries to comprehend with the help of speculative reason that which can only be accessible to faith. All modern theological literature in Germany is permeated with this error, the main culprit of which is the leader of the modern theological movement, Ritschl. Hence it is clear why, despite the apparent progress of German Protestant theology, in essence there is not the slightest movement forward in it. To pass off the development that is noticeable from Luther to the Bremen preacher Schwalbe, from Melanchthon to Biedermann as progress would mean asserting something very dubious, and this is avoided by all right-thinking among the Protestants themselves. However, if we consider the point of view of Hartmann, who presented clear and convincing evidence of the progress taking place in Protestantism, then, of course, the indicated process of development can be considered progress, but only in the sense in which the decomposition and eradication of the Christian faith can be considered progress. As in any other science, so in theology, the fundamental false principle was necessarily bound to lead to the most disastrous results. If in theology everything depends on knowledge and there is no need for a special organ of knowledge, namely faith, then thought directly and necessarily comes to that view, which is one of the basic principles of Protestantism, namely the doctrine of the sufficiency of Holy Scripture, as a complete and perfect sum of truths necessary for salvation. Holy Scripture, according to Orthodox teaching, is only the embodiment in writing of that broader and deeper collection of truths, which is known as Holy Tradition and which serves as the norm for the understanding and interpretation of Scripture itself. Since Holy Tradition existed before Scripture, which constitutes only a partial reproduction of it, then by its very breadth it is in a certain sense more important than Scripture, and without it it would not only be impossible to understand the latter, but its very existence would also be impossible. The relationship between them can be likened to the relationship between written and unwritten laws, between the code of laws and customary law, which operates in life and influences it much more deeply than all formal regulations, which themselves are only based on this customary law and in it they draw their force and meaning. Therefore, just as it would be absurd for the legislator to break the connection with this living source of all law and deny it, considering the written law to be completely sufficient, which would inevitably turn into a dead book of instructions that have nothing to do with life, so it was absurd in the field of theology to break the connection with that ever-living Tradition on which the entire church is based and by which it lives. But since this living Tradition, in which lies the constant breath of the life-giving Spirit of God, cannot be subject to exact mechanical knowledge, but requires a special organ of perception, namely faith, Protestantism rejected it, proclaiming the principle of the complete sufficiency of Holy Scripture alone for salvation. Having stood on this basis, Protestantism thereby broke its connection with the source of true spiritual life and turned into a purely formal system. But in order to stay on this basis, it became necessary for him to make another assumption: that everything in Holy Scripture is so clear that there is no need for any aid to understand it and it is enough for everyone to read it without any prejudice. But when this principle was expressed, then that blatant arbitrariness was revealed, which led to all the extremes of rationalism. Not to mention the fact that the clarity of Holy Scripture should not be understood in the ordinary sense of the word, because it is clear only to the Divine Spirit Himself, who spoke truths that often surpass any understanding of the limited human mind; allowing this limited mind to clearly interpret for itself all the secrets of the divine economy meant not only relegating them to the level of ordinary phenomena, but also giving this mind the right to measure everything by the measure of its limitations, to essentially grant the right to arbitrarily treat the greatest truths of existence, to recognize only those that are truly clear and to deny all the unclear ones, even if they were not clear only to the limited mind of the individual reader. This arbitrariness was already revealed by the founder of German Protestantism, Luther. Although he openly declared in Worms that “if he is refuted on the basis of Holy Scripture or by clear and irrefutable arguments, he will not resist,” but this statement obviously dates back to the period when he was not sufficiently aware of the abyss he was striving for. In fact, he could not resist, and could not resist on this basis, and when it was noticed to him that Holy Scripture does not completely confirm the doctrine he put forward about justification by faith, he was not embarrassed to begin distorting the text; in the famous saying of the Apostle Paul he added the particle “allein” - “by faith alone”, which does not exist in the original, 13 a since the whole letter was going against him Apostle James, which puts forward the principle of justification by works, without which faith is dead, then, going in the same direction, Luther further rejected this entire message, contemptuously calling it “straw.” Here, for the first time, Protestantism, following its false path to rationalism, entered that fatal ground of doubt, criticism and denial, through which it reached its present terrible state, when there is hardly a book of the Old or New Testament that has not been subjected to critical negation to one degree or another. But if the founder of German Protestantism based his main teaching on arbitrariness, i.e. did not read it from the Bible, but on the contrary, he himself introduced it into the Bible, then it is not surprising that others, although they consider themselves followers of him, could in fact take a different path of reasoning and come to new or special conclusions. A historical study of the conditions and causes of the Reformation has sufficiently shown how this teaching necessarily appeared not as the result of a calm and disinterested study, but rather as a product of the painful spiritual struggles of a passionate, deep and strong nature, a highly gifted person who was brought out of his state of spiritual balance by all the abuses he saw in church-religious life. But times have changed and the principle itself has lost its former meaning. And since it was based on an artificial interpretation of Holy Scripture, it is not surprising that the newest Protestant theology, even in the person of its moderate representatives, begins to gradually bypass this teaching. Already 30 years ago, Döllinger, with his characteristic insight, drew attention to the fact that the newest evangelical theology has quietly bypassed the old Lutheran doctrine of justification and only a few theologians still accept it. 14 If this was the situation then, then hardly anyone will have the courage to deny that now the situation is even worse. And it cannot but be justly reproached to evangelical theology that it did not at all attempt to refute this cruel attack on the part of the famous scientist on the material principle of Protestantism, although at the same time it did not have the courage to openly recognize the truth of this statement of Döllinger. It simply limited itself to silencing the subject. But it is completely impossible to silence him. After all, anyone who has studied the history of the Reformation at all knows that only an unshakable faith in the truth of his doctrine of justification, this “member of the faith with which the church stands and falls,” gave Luther the courage to undertake his task of alienating a huge part of the Christian world from the Roman church. Since now Protestant theology itself no longer dares to affirm the conformity of this teaching with Holy Scripture, does this not pronounce a verdict on Luther’s entire work? But if the most essential, so-called material principle of Protestantism is no longer recognized as more valid, then what essentially remains of Protestantism itself? What remains is one bare denial, which, as such, of course, cannot serve as a source of positive church-religious life. It is hardly necessary to say that no system can normally be based on bare negation, which sooner or later must feel its groundlessness and look for another, positive foundation. And there is no doubt. that even now among well-meaning Protestant theologians there are many who, realizing the hopelessness of Protestantism as a religious system, are looking for support for themselves in some more thorough and positive system. But where can one find such a system? Should we really return to the fold of Roman Catholicism again? Many do not stop at this, and Roman Catholic newspapers now and then publish lists of noble German persons who have converted to the bosom of the Roman Church. But of course, this is only possible for individual individuals, and not for an entire religion. Centuries of bitter struggle have managed to put too deep a line of separation or alienation between these two religious systems for them to once again merge into one whole. But if the return of Protestantism to Roman Catholicism is impossible, then what remains? Yes, there remains a very simple and only outcome. After all, Protestantism appeared as an expression of powerful protest against the intolerable abuses of Roman Catholicism, which carries the concept of limitation in its very name. Apart from Roman Catholicism; which has stained itself with numerous errors that continue to multiply to this day, there is still another Catholicism, in the name of which the German reformer himself essentially protested, namely the Catholicism of the ancient undivided church. This Catholicism embodies the ancient teaching of Christianity in all its inviolability and purity, and it has survived to this day not only as an abstract principle, but also as a truly existing church, namely the ancient catholic and apostolic church. This is precisely the Orthodox Eastern Church. Even well-meaning Protestants recognize it as such. Thus, Thiersch, in his famous course of lectures on Catholicism and Protestantism, literally says the following: “The Eastern Church, having in all those points in which it diverges from the Latin. antiquity, which has a large antiquity on its side, stands before the latter as an extraordinary factual, historical witness (of antiquity), so that even if all the written documents of church history were destroyed, by its very existence it would refute the claim that all legal concepts, customs and teachings, which in the Middle Ages gave a special character to Latin Christianity, alone and forever have true meaning.” 15 In other words (the author of the brochure explains this tirade): the Orthodox Church, or, as it is usually called in the West in order to arouse antipathy towards it, the Russian Church is the Catholic Church.” “Return,” he appeals to the Protestants, “to the catholicity of a single and undivided church, in which for a thousand years all Christian peoples recognized themselves as one and under the banner of which Charlemagne once united the scattered German tribes into a single state! - to that church that knew neither the courts of the Inquisition nor the trials against witches. The persecution of witches, a thousand times worse than the Inquisition with its bonfires, was the most terrible of all spiritual errors into which a part of humanity has ever fallen, and yet the Roman, like the Lutheran church, in their ill-fated blindness, competing with each other, brought countless hecatombs of unfortunate people to this terrible madness. Only the venerable Eastern Church has never been tainted by this terrible error. For she, keeping with sacred fidelity the ancient Christian tradition, did not lose, as happened to other churches, the promise of the Lord in Matthew 28:20 (“Behold, I am with you to the end of the age”). “An empty dream! - they will exclaim to us. But you, we object, are deliberately closing your eyes to the obvious fact that the German people are falling more and more into religious and moral nihilism. Meanwhile, Protestantism, consumed by the poison of free inquiry, provides “no help against it”... This, in general terms, is the content of the book of the anonymous “Orthodox Catholic”, who came out in defense of the Orthodox Church against the insinuations of Protestant unbelief, and we, expressing our heartfelt gratitude to him, can only wish that such sober voices would be heard more often in the West, which sooner or later should awaken the church-religious conscience of Western humanity. We mean his articles in the latest books of the Nineteenth Century magazine: 1) The place of heresy and schism in the Modern Christian Church (for July), and 2) True and false conceptions of the Atonement (for August), which aroused a strong movement in theological spheres, especially in England. See Weder Protestantismus noch Romanismus, sondern Katholizismus. Streit-und Friedensschritt eines Orthodoxen Katholiken. Berlin 1894, Zweite Auflage. This is the same book that Protopresbyter I.L. Yanyshev recently recommended to Russian society and the clergy in his letter to the editors of the Church Bulletin (see No. 38, p. 607). This article sets out only the main thoughts of the author, regardless of the characteristics of his literary techniques, as well as his private opinions. Although we know the name of the venerable author, respecting his wish to remain anonymous, we will not reveal his identity. See Biederman, Handbuch der Christl. Dogmatik, mto.687, 752. O. Flügel, Moderne specul. Theologie, p.56. O. Flügel, Moderne specul. Theologie, p.688. O. Flügel, Moderne specul. Theologie, pp. 73 et seq. E.v.Hartmann, Krisis d. Cliristenthums, pp. ix, 28, 37. Cm. Volk, dated April 4, 1894 Similar facts were noted more than once in the “Chronicle of Church and Social Life Abroad” in the “Church Bulletin”. As Deputy Einern recently put it when discussing church issues in the Reichstag (according to an abstract from the Kölnische Zeitung). P .Dubois-Reymond, Grundlage d. Erkenntniss in d.exacten Wissenschaften ; see also Helmholtz, Thatsachen der Wahrnehmungen: “What is attainable for us is the knowledge of the established order in the realm of reality, which is perceived only through the signal system of our sensory impressions.” P .Dubois-Reymond, Grundlage d. Erkenntniss in d.exacten Wissenschaften ; pp.117, 120, 122, 124. Die Welt als Wille II, p.206. We understand the well-known passage in Romans 3:28: “For we acknowledge that a man is justified by faith, apart from the works of the law.” In Luther, this verse reads like this: So halten wir es nun, dass der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben. In addition to the fact that the very rearrangement of words is clearly tendentious, the insertion of the word allein, which is not in the Greek original or in the Vulgate, reveals complete arbitrariness on the part of the reformer. Düllinger, Kirche u.Kirchen pp.42–439. Thiersch, Vorlesungen über Katholiz. u.Protestantismus I, p.214.