A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism
by
Paul Tillich,
Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
4.17 · Rating details · 245 ratings · 14 reviews
Previously published in two separate volumes entitled
Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone
====
URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich
====
CHAPTER V New Ways of Mediation
hat we have just been dealing with has been the reaction to the great
synthesis, the attempt to overcome the cleavages in the modem mind. There is an
interesting fact that at the end of the nineteenth century people who sensed
very deeply what was happening through the destruction of the great synthesis,
the distortion of its elements, the approaching nihilism, etc., all seemed to
live on the boundary line of insanity. Nietzsche himself was on this boundary
line and was finally completely encompassed by it. So was a man like
Baudelaire, the French poet, and Rimbaud and Strindberg. They could not deal
with the fin de siecle (the situation at the end of the nineteenth
century). And painters like Van Gogh and Munch were afflicted in the same way.
They are all expressions of the disturbing and destructive consequences of the
breakdown of the great synthesis. Their inability to find a roof for themselves
drove them into this situation. Or one can say that people who because of their
makeup were in danger of falling into insanity could become the prophets of the
coming catastrophe—because of their intense sensitivity—and at the same time
the representatives of the new situation. These men were lonely geniuses who
anticipated the catastrophes of our century and also contributed to the
catastrophes by destroying the unifying traditions of the Western world and the
syntheses of Hegel and Schleiermacher.
Now we must deal with a large group of highly intelligent, scholarly,
and pious theologians who are usually classified in general as theolo‑
New Ways of Mediation 505
gians of
mediation. The term "theology of mediation" (Vermittlungs-theologie)
can be understood in two ways. It can be understood as something merely
negative, by identifying mediation with compromise. It is very easy to accuse a
theologian of compromising the message with the modern mind. This places him
before the alternative of simply repeating the given tradition or of mediating
the tradition to the modem mind. If he simply repeats he is superfluous,
because the tradition is there and everyone has access to it, whether or not he
understands it at all. But if he is not to be superfluous, he becomes a
theologian of mediation, mediating the tradition. And this is the second sense,
and something positive. We could say that theology by definition is mediation.
The term "theology of mediation" is almost a tautology, for a
theology that does not mediate the tradition is no theology. In this sense I
would defend every theologian who is accused of being a theologian of
mediation, and I myself would cease being a theologian altogether if I had to
abandon the work of mediation. For the alternative to it is repetition, and
that is not theology at all.
The critical undertone in the term "theology of mediation"—for
the term has taken on a negative connotation—is directed against those who
tried to rescue as much as possible in Schleiermacher's theology and in Hegel's
philosophy (and vice versa)—for both were philosophers and theologians—and to
make them more adequate to the religious tradition. The theology of mediation
did not represent a new breakthrough, a new beginning, but more an attempt to
save what could be saved, and to combine parts of the tradition of Hegel and
Schleiermacher with the Christian tradition.
Most of these theologians of mediation are not known even by name in
this country, and since they do not have any direct influence here, we will for
the most part bypass them. This is not true, however, of the famous attempt to
go back to Kant as a help in the situation. This battle cry, this signal of
return or retreat, as I like to call it, was sounded by Ritschl and his group.
This had great influence in this country. When I came to this country
P.itschlianism was dead in Germany, but here to my great surprise it was very
much alive.
Let us look at some of the types of theology of mediation. The problem
they all had was to gain certainty about the contents of the
506 A History of Christian Thought
Christian message, after
the critical movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had arisen.
Everything fell under criticism. Everything was in doubt. The traditional
forms had no power of resisting historical criticism or philosophical
criticism, even if they would be repeated again and again by the theologians of
restoration. So it was necessary to answer this fundamental question: Is there
a way of reestablishing certainty in the religious realm?
A. EXPERIENCE AND THE BIBLICAL
MESSAGE
One
of the answers to the fundamental questions of certainty was given through a
return to Schleiermacher's concept of religious consciousness. The word
"experience" was used rather than "consciousness." But it
was obviously dependent on Schleiermacher's idea of religion. We can see many
theologians in whom the problem of religious experience was in the center of
their thinking. In this country there was a theology of experience, the so-called
empirical theology. For the moment I want to speak of some of these important
theological schools of mediation.
1. The Erlangen School
There
was the Erlangen school in Germany which preserved a strong attachment to the
Lutheran tradition. In this school Schleiermacher's idea of the religious
consciousness was enlarged in significance under the heading of the concept of
experience. The religious experience meant everything. Let us look at this
word. Experience can mean many things. During my first years in America, in the
thirties and forties, the atmosphere around Columbia University was influenced
by Dewey's pragmatism to such an extent that the word "experience"
was used for almost everything. Then I realized that it was simply another word
for "reality." For the objective reality was questioned and
experience expressed the going beyond of subjects and objects. This word was
used so much that I finally had the feeling that the word had become useless.
Probably this is still the situation. For this reason I have tried to intro‑
New Ways of Mediation 507
duce the word
"encounter" which is taken from Buber's concept of the I-Thou
encounter.
In any case, the theologians following Schleiermacher asked the
question: How can we attain to certainty about God, about revelation, about
Christ, about the divine Spirit, etc.? Kant had criticized every way of
reaching God by arguments. These theologians of experience accepted Kant's
criticism. Nor could they go along with the speculative theology which followed
Hegel, using much more refined arguments. Then there was the way of historical
research. But this way was closed because historical research, so far from
giving contents, actually removed them or made them doubtful, and questioned
the whole historical foundation of Christianity. How can we reach a history
which happened two thousand years ago when we know so little about it in terms
of sound historical research? If this is the case, there is only one possible
answer left. There must be a point of immediate participation, and for this the
word "experience" was used. The experience of the divine reality must
be the presence of the divine reality in us, and this must be the only possible
assuring element. Then, however, the question arose: How can the inner
experience which we have in our century guarantee anything which has happened
hundreds of years ago? The answer to this question was: The reality of the past
event is guaranteed by the effect it has on me.
A man named F. H. R. Frank (1827-1894), professor in Erlangen, produced
a whole system of theology in which he tried to show how my status here and now
as a Christian is dependent on the witness of the Old and New Testaments to
what has happened. All the biblical stories, including creation, ultimate
fulfillment, the coming of Christ, even the miracles, are guaranteed by my
personal experience here and now. It is a kind of projection of my experience
into the divine-human reality of the biblical peiod. Such a method was very
impressive and was at that time the only way out. But, of course, it was not
difficult for the critics to reply that everything that you project out of your
own experience has been given to you originally by the Bible and the tradition,
and that therefore you cannot escape being dependent on them. So you cannot
guarantee the contents by your own experience. But if not, then in what way is
it possible? This brings us to the fundamental problem with
508 A History of Christian Thought
which modern
theology is still wrestling. We cannot accept as the Roman Catholics do the
authority of councils and popes. Of course, ultimately they cannot do that
either, that is, without having within themselves the experience of the
spiritual power of the Roman Church. As long as they do not ask questions,
there is no problem, but if they ask questions, then their answer is also
experiential. It is based on the experience of the glory, the truth, and the
power of the Roman Church and that to which it witnesses. In other words, even
the authoritarian Roman Catholic Christians are not able to escape that element
of subjectivity which we call experience. But this experience does not give
them any contents. All the contents come from the church, its tradition, and
the Bible. The fact that they accept these contents is due to their
participation in the spirit of the church.
The same thing can be true with Protestants. As I mentioned before,
Kierkegaard had the idea of becoming contemporaneous with Jesus by leaping over
two thousand years. How is that possible? It is a matter of question what
Kierkcgaard really meant, but perhaps he meant what Paul said when he said that
we do not know the Christ any longer according to the flesh but according to
the Spirit. We are in Christ (en Christo) insofar as he is the Spirit.
This is immediate participation. Here you see a theological problem which arose
out of the dissolution of the great synthesis. How much can experience
guarantee? Can it guarantee any of the Contents in space and time? I do not
believe that this is a settled question. We are still in the midst of this
situation. When today we ask, What guarantees the Christ-character of Jesus of
Nazareth? we cannot give a merely historical answer, because the historical
scientific answer leaves us in a state of doubt, of degrees of probability or
improbability, and does not carry us beyond this. But if we say that something
has happened to me, we speak in terms of experience. This thing which has
happened to me is related to an event which must have happened in history,
because it has had an impact on my own historical existence. This is something
which certainly can be said and must be said. Then there remains the question
as to how much can actually be guaranteed by religious experience? I leave you
with this question, the question with which all the theologians of mediation
struggled in trying to overcome the gap between subject and object
New Ways of Mediation 509
which was
opened up during the Enlightenment, which was seemingly closed in the great
synthesis, but then opened up again. And so it stands wide open today, with
some new attempts to close it being made at the same time.
2. Martin Kähler
At this time another theologian appeared who dealt with the same
problem, but tried to answer it in a different way. He was Martin Kähler, also
a theologian of mediation. He found an answer which became very important and
which will be discussed for a long time to come, but mainly, no doubt, in the
form which Bultmann has given to it. The impact of Kahler was very great in
many directions. In his time his impact was limited by the Kant-Ritschlian
school which dominated the European universities. Today the situation has
changed and the lifework of this theologian has become visible again.
What Martin Kähler did for us—now I speak half-historically and
half-autobiographically--was of twofold significance. First, he understood the
problem of doubt; he understood the question: How can the subject in religion
come to the object? How can they be reunited after having been separated by the
criticism of the Enlightenment and the subsequent events? And he answered: This
doubt is an element in the continuous human situation which we cannot simply
overcome by putting everything into the subjectivity of experience. We must combine
the subjectivity of experience, which he also had to accept like everyone else,
with the objectivity of the biblical witness. So he pointed to the reality
which is described in this witness, not only its central manifestation, namely,
the Christ and all that is connected with him, but also the reality of the
divine in nature and history, and beyond nature and history, in creation and
fulfillment. But how can these two things come together, the subjective and the
objective? His answer was that they cannot in an absolute way. They can come
together only in a way which accepts the limits of our finitude. This means
that we cannot reach absolute certainty. He placed this in analogy to the
Protestant message of justification by grace through faith, namely, the
acceptance of man in spite of his disrupted inner life and estrangement, which
can
510 A History of Christian Thought
never be fully
overcome. This is the Lutheran idea of the impossibility of being a saint
without being at the same time a sinner (siniul lustus et peccator).
Now Kahler applied this message of justification not only to the inner
moral acts of man, but also to his inner intellectual acts. Not only he who has
sinned in the moral sense of the word, but also he who has doubted—the intellectual
form of sin—is accepted by God. The doctrine of justification is applied to
thoughts and not only to morality. This means that doubt does not necessarily
separate us from God. This is what I learned from Kiihlcr at that time and
developed further in my own theology. But the first impact came from the
theology of mediation rooted in the fundamental principle of the Reformation,
and then applied to the situation of the split between subject and object since
the beginning of the modern period. That is the one thing which came out of
this theology of mediation. Similar ideas have become increasingly common in
both Europe and America because of the enduring split between the objectivity
of the Bible and tradition, and the subjectivity of experience. They
come together, but never fully. The split remains, and so doubt remains.
The other point in Kähler's impact on us had to do with historical
criticism. Historical criticism is a way of approaching the objective side,
namely, those events which we say have had a transforming impact on us. I low
can we become certain of those events? They are the events that are responsible
for our inner experience of being saved in spite of being sinners and doubters.
Kähler's answer to the problem of the historical treatment of the Bible was
given in terms of a sharp distinction between the historical Jesus and the
Christ of faith. His famous book, The So-called Historical Jesus and the
Historic, Biblical Christ, is coming out in English translation, with an
introduction to Kahler and his theology by a former student of mine, because it
is so relevant to our own situation.'
What is the relationship between the historical Jesus and the Christ of
faith? Can we separate them? Must we accept the idea that Christ can never be reached
by us apart from faith? Is there anything that can
iTranslated, edited, and with an Introduction by Carl E. Braaten (Philadelphia;
Fortress Press, 1964).
New Ways of Mediation 511
be done about
the doubts produced by historical research into the biblical writings? Kähler
himself did not believe that the two must be separated. For Kahler the Jesus of
history is at the same time the Christ of faith, and the certainty of the
Christ of faith is independent of the historical results of the critical
approach to the New Testament. Faith guarantees what historical research can
never reach. How can faith do this? What can faith guarantee? There lies the
problem today, a problem which has been sharpened in the meantime by people
like Bultmann and his whole school. The first real view of this situation in
its radical aspects, however, we owe to Kahler, who came from the great
synthesis, lived in it during a certain period of his life, then was transformed
by the awakening movement and became one of the leading theologians of this
period. But, as I told you, this position of Kähler was not decisive for the
situation in the nineteenth century. He was a prophetic forerunner of what
developed more fully only in the twentieth century. The heritage of Martin Kähler
has been rediscovered only in the present-day discussion in view of the radical
criticism, and not only in Europe but also in this country.
B. Tr "BACK To Krcr"
MOVEMENT
Now I Want to deal with the Kant-Ritschl-Hamack line of thought which
led to Troeltsch in Germany and to Rauschenbusch and the so-called liberal
theology in this country.
Why did a certain theological group suddenly raise the cry "back to
Kant" after the great synthesis crumbled and they were surrounded by its
many pieces? Why Kant and nobody else? None of these people said "back to
orthodoxy" or "back to pietism." There were philosophers as well
as theologians in the neo-Kantian school which was dominant at the time that I
was a student. It was the Ritschlian school which introduced Kantianism into
theology. You recall what we said about Kant's prison of finitude. Kant's
critical epistemology determined that we cannot apply the categories of
finitude to the divine. But, there was one point of breakthrough in the sphere
of practical reason, namely, the experience of the moral imperative and its
unconditional character. Here alone can we transcend the limits of finitude.
But we cannot do it
512 A History of Christian Thought
theoretically.
We cannot prove God or speak of God directly, but only in terms of "as
if." We call this a regulative way of speaking, not a constitutive way
which can affirm something directly of God.
This retreat to Kant goes in the opposite direction of that other slogan
which I used before: "Understanding Kant means transcending Kant."
This was the idea of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. The
Ritschlians argued that the result of this transcending Kant was the ruins of
the great synthesis which now lay before them, like the broken pieces of the Tower
of Babel. But the Ritschlians did not believe that these pieces could be put
back together in the way that the other theologians of mediation tried to do.
Nor was a return to Orthodoxy or Pietism or biblicism possible as the
theologians of restoration tried to do. So another way had to be found. This
way was a withdrawal to the acceptance of our finitude as we have it in Kant's
critical philosophy. The Ritschlians said that Kant is the philosopher of
Protestantism. Protestantism does not aspire to climb up to the divine, but
keeps itself within the limits of finitude. The attempt of the great synthesis
is ultimately a product of mysticism, of the principle of identity between the
divine and the human. Therefore, this "back to Kant" movement was extremely
hostile to all forms of mysticism, including the theologies of experience,
because there is a mystical clement present in Schleier-macher's idea of
religious consciousness and the other forms of experiential theology.
Experience means having the divine within ourselves, not necessarily by nature,
but yet given and felt within our own being. But this was not admitted by the
neo-Kantian school. They protested not only against genuine mysticism, but also
against every theology of experience. What then was left? Only two thixigs. The
one is historical research. This is the greatness and at the same time the
shortcoming of liberal theology. It is the greatness insofar as it dares to
apply the historical method to the biblical literature; it is the shortcoming
insofar as it tries to base faith on the results of historical research. That
was what they tried to do. There is thus a positive and a negative side in this
school.
But there must be a second factor, for how can there be religious
certainty? According to the Ritschlians, Kant has left but one window out of
our finitude, and this is the moral imperative. The real basis of certainty is
the moral point of view. We are certain of ourselves as moral
New Ways of Mediation 513
personalities.
This is not the experience of something mystical outside of ourselves; this is
the immediate personal experience, or more exactly, the experience of being a
person as such. Religion is then that which makes us able to actualize
ourselves as moral persons. Religion is a supporting power of the ethical.
These defenders of Christianity tried to save Christianity with the help of the
moral principle, but in doing so they aroused the wrath of all those for whom
the mystical element in religion is decisive. So here we have a religion argued
for on the basis of the ethical experience of the personality. Religion is the
help toward moral self-realization. So the two sides of the 1itschlian theology
are: objective, scientific research and the moral principle or
experience of the ethical personality.
The great synthesis about which we have been speaking dealt seriously
with the question of truth. Christianity's claim was that it mediated truth,
truth about God, the world, and man. That means there is ontological,
cosmological, and anthropological truth. Both Schleier-macher and Hegel wanted
to affirm the truth in connection with the whole of reality. The critics of
Hegel and the Hegelians denied that a satisfactory synthesis had been achieved
between Christianity and philosophical knowledge about man, nature, the
universe as a whole, and the divine source and ground of the universe. So the
neo-Kantians and the Ritschlians gave up the claim to truth in this sense. They
withdrew to Kant's critique of practical reason and said: The divine appears
through the moral imperative and nowhere else. The problem of truth was
replaced by the moral answer. The function of Christianity is then to make
morality possible. From this point of view all ontological questions were
dropped so far as possible. Of course, it is never fully possible for anyone to
do that. In the neo-Kantian school itself there arose people at the beginning
of this century who showed that there are always ontological presuppositions in
every epistemology. It is self-deception to believe that you can answer the
famous question, "How do you know?" before you know something, before
you answer questions, and then put them under criticism. Epistemology cannot
stand on its own feet because knowing and the reality which is known are both
ontological concepts. You cannot escape definite presuppositions if you deal
with knowledge. The same is true of modern analytic philosophy. It analyzes
man's logical and linguistic structures, but it always has a hidden pre‑
514 A History of Christian Thought
supposition
about the relation of logic and language to reality, even if it does not
acknowledge it. Sometimes this relation is completely negative when it is said
that we do not know anything about reality, and that our logical and linguistic
structures have nothing to do with reality. But this must then be proven, and
if somebody tries to prove it, he is an ontologist. Or if there is a positive
relation, they have to do what philosophers have always done: they have to show
how language and logic are related to reality.
So Ritschlianism was a withdrawal from the ontological to the moral. The
whole religious message, the message of Jesus which had to be described in
historical terms, is a message which liberates the personality from the
pressures of nature both outside of and within man. The function of salvation
is the victory of spirit or mind over nature. The way this happens is through
the forgiveness of sins. This is the inner meaning of the Ritschlian theology
of retreat. It was a theology which could fortify the strong development of the
bourgeois personality in the middle and the end of the nineteenth century. In
an article in the book, The Christian Answer,2 edited by Van
Dusen, formerly president of Union Theological Seminary, New York, I have given
a long description of this development of the personality ideal from the
Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century, by showing some works of the
visual arts. There you can see what a bourgeois personality is. The Ritschlian
theology provided the theological foundation for this development of the
strong, active, morally disciplined individual person. It was connected with
liberal elements in the social and political structure, with autonomous
thinking in the sciences and with the rejection of all authority. It was
compatible with the mood of the time, the liberal personalistic mood, but this
was not to last long into the twentieth century.
The Ritschlian negation of ontology was joined with another concept which
is still being discussed in modern American philosophy, although not as much
now as thirty years ago when I came to this country. This is the concept of
value judgments. Instead of making ontological statements, it was alleged that
Christianity makes value judgments. This means that everything is related to
the subject who makes value
2 'The World Situation," The Christian Answer, edited by Henry
P. Van Dusen (New York: Charles Scribnes's Sons, 1948).
New Ways of Mediation 515
judgments. This
was a typical device of escape. It was taken from Rudolf Lotze, (1817-1881),
an important figure in the history of philosophy in the middle of the
nineteenth century. How could man's spiritual life, man's personality, be saved
in the face of the increasing naturalism which dissolves everything into a
constellation of atoms? The answer was that although we are unable to make
ontological judgments, we can make value judgments. On the basis of value
judgments, we can evaluate Christianity as that religion which can overcome the
forces of the natural and secure us as personalities of disciplined moral
character.
You can see an analogy to this in the secularized puritanism—not the
original puritanism—of this country. This was the reason for Ritschl's
influence in this country long after it had died out in Germany. It was
mediated through pupils of Ritschl himself or of Wilhelm Herrmann (1846-1922) in Marburg under whom many
Americans studied. He was a man in whom liberalism was connected with a profound
piety and a strong desire to liberate Christianity from all authoritarian ties.
Out of the Ritschlian antiontological feeling came a doctrine of God in
which the element of power in God was denied or reduced almost to nothing. It
tried to overcome the polarity of power and love in God, and to reduce the idea
of God to love. The message of salvation was reduced to forgiveness. The symbol
of divine wrath and judgment was removed from practical piety. This was in line
with the Enlightenment, with Kantianism and the whole humanistic tradition. It
was also very successful. But a criticism is necessary. When we pray, we
usually start our prayers with "Almighty God." In doing so we
immediately attribute might and power to God. The divinity of God lies in his being
the ultimate power of being. This was one of the weakest points in the
Ritschlian theology, and at this point the criticism set in.
C. ADOLF VON HARNACK
The greatest figure in the Ritschlian school was Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930). He was a very impressive figure,
basically a church historian. His greatest achievement was the History of Dogma,3 still a classical work in this area of
research. Any student of the history of
3 Seven vols., translated by Neil Buchanan (New York: Dover Publications,
1900).
516 A History of Christian Thought
Christian
thought must reckon with it. Those of you who come from very conservative
traditions may have the feeling, without admitting it, that the dogmas sort of
fell down from heaven. If you read Harnack's History of Dogma, you will see
how the great creeds—the Apostles', the Nicene, and the Chalcedonian—came into
existence, how much historical drama, how much of human passions, and also how
much divine providential guidance were involved in this development. You will
see that the ecumenical councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon used a lot of terms
from Greek philosophy in formulating the trinitarian and chris-tological
dogmas. Harnack saw in this development a second wave of Hellenization. The
first wave was gnosticism, and the second wave was the formulation of the
ancient dogma. The first was rejected by the church; the second was accepted
and used by the church.
Harnack's research into the history of dogma raised a lot of problems
which are still being discussed in theology today. The relation of Christianity
to gnosticism is still a live issue. Perhaps the most important book on
gnosticism is the one written by Hans Jonas, entitled Gnosis und spätantiker
Geist.4 His interpretation of gnosticism is based on
existentialist categories as used by 1-leidegger and other existentialists. It
shows you that the speculations of the gnostics were not all nonsense, but were
based on the human situation in the late ancient world, which—like our own
situation—was one of complete disruption and meaninglessness. There was the
longing for salvation, the continual looking for saving powers in a
deteriorated world at the end of the Roman Empire. Gnosticism was an attempt to
express the saving forces and describe the human situation in categories very
like those of the present-day existentialist philosophers.
But Christianity rejected gnosticism for one reason. These gnostics were
anti-Old Testament. That means they were against the idea of creation, that the
world is created good, that there is no matter from which one must be
liberated, etc. Liberation according to Christianity is liberation from
finitude and sin, and not from matter in which we are involved. In other
words, the dualistic form of gnosticism was rejected, the dualism between a
highest God and a counter God. The church
4 Gottingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1934. Cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston; Beacon Press, 1958).
New Ways of Mediation 517
succeeded in rejecting
this gnostic dualism. But the church nevertheless used the concepts of the
hellenistic world. You should not call them Greek pure and simple, for
classical Greek did not last far beyond the second century before Christ.
Hellenism followed this, and Hellenism is a mixture of Greek, Persian,
Egyptian, Jewish, and even Indian elements, and mystical groups of all kinds.
It is a mixed religiosity in which the Greek concepts were used, but in a
religiously transformed sense.
In
order to be received the Christian message had to be proclaimed in categories
which could be understood by the people who were to receive it. The Christian
Church did this without fear. Harnack's criticism was that in this way
Christianity became intellectualized. But Harnack was wrong in this respect. My
main criticism of him has been right on this point. The more our knowledge of
the gnostics and the whole Hellenistic culture has increased in the last fifty
years, the more we see how wrong he was in this respect. He considered
Hellenism as identical with intellectualization. This is not at all true. This
is not even true of Plato, or Aristotle and the Stoics. Every great philosophy
is rooted in an existential emergency, in a situation of questioning out of
which saving answers must come. If you read Plato and Aristotle you will find
that this is certainly the case with them. But in Hellenism this is manifestly
so, because the whole period from B.C. 100 to about A.D. 400 is a period in which
the question of salvation from distorted reality stands in the center. The
Greek concepts already had a religious tinge when they were used by the
Christian dogmas. So Harnack was right in saying that Hellenization had taken
place, but wrong in defining this as intellectualization.
According
to Harnack a foreign element entered into Christianity when terms like ousia
and hypostasis were used in constructing the official dogma of the
church. This process began not only in the fourth-and fifth-century councils,
but already in the apostolic fathers, and that means in the generation which is
contemporaneous with the latest biblical writings. Then this process received a
strong impetus from the apologists who elaborated the logos concept in
theology. All this can be called Hellenization, but how else could it have
happened? The pagans were not Jews, and so the Jewish concepts could not be
used. Besides, the Jewish concepts were not used so much even in the circles in
which
518 A History of Christian Thought
Jesus and John
the Baptist arose. If you read the Dead Sea Scrolls, you will find that the Old
Testament concepts are there, but even more you will find elements from the
apocalyptic movements from the intertesta-mental period. Even Judaism had
adapted to the new situation. It could not have been done in any other way if
Judaism or Christianity were to survive.
1 larnack's greatness is that he showed this process of Hellenization. I
us shortcoming is that he did not see the necessity of it. Those of us Who studied
under the influence of ilarnack's History of Dogma sensed a tremendous
liberation. It was the liberation from the necessity of identifying Hellenistic
concepts with the Christian message itself. On the other hand, I would not
accept the idea which one hears so much that all the Greek elements must he
thrown out and only the Old Testament terms should be used. Christianity, it is
suggested, is basically a matter of the Old Testament language and a
continuation of Old Testament theology and piety. If this were to be done
consistently, at least two-thirds of the New Testament would have to be ruled
out, for both Paul and John used a lot of I lellenistic concepts. Besides, it
would rule out the whole history of doctrine. This idea is a new bondage to a particular
development, the Old Testament development. Christianity is not nearer to the
Jews than to the Greeks. I believe that the one who expressed that was the
great missionary to the Creeks and to the Hellenistic pagan world.
There is another side to I larnack which was much more impressive for
the masses of educated people at the turn of the century. He himself once told
me that in the year 1900 the main railway station in the city of Leipzig, one
of the largest in Central Europe, was blocked by freight cars in which his book
What Is Christianity? was being sent all over the world. He also told us
that this book was being translated into more languages than any other book
except the Bible. This means that this book, which was the religious witness of
one of the greatest scholars of the century, had great significance to the
educated people prior to the first World War. It meant the possibility of
affirming the Christian message in a form which was free from its dogmatic
captivity and at the same time very much rooted in the biblical image of Jesus.
But in order to elaborate this image, he invented the formula which
distinguished
New Ways of Mediation 519
sharply between
the gospel of Jesus and the gospel about Jesus. He stated that the gospel about
Jesus does not belong in the gospel preached by Jesus. This is the classical
formula of liberal theology: the gospel or message preached by Jesus contains
nothing of the later message preached concerning Jesus.
Such a statement presupposes the reduction of the gospel to the first
three Gospels, then the elimination from these Gospels of all that shows the
influence of Paul. Baur's theory of the conflict between Paul and Jesus is
revived here in a more refined, modern way, namely, that Paul interpreted Jesus
in a way which is very far removed from the actual historical Jesus. This idea
of course has some contemporary followers. Only it is not Paul who is so much
at the center of the discussion, but the early community, which existed before
Paul. This early community, on the basis of the resurrection experience,
produced the doctrines about Jesus, doctrines which cannot be found in the
original message of Jesus himself. This original message is the message of the
coming kingdom, and the kingdom is the state in which God and the individual
member of the kingdom are in a relation of forgiveness, acceptance, and love.
Again someone might say, you have merely presented this, but have not
criticized it. So I will anticipate this question and say, I don't believe that
this is a possible approach. I believe that the whole New Testament is united,
including the first three Gospels, in the statement that Jesus is the Christ,
the bringer of the new eon. I think this fundamental statement overcomes the
split between Jesus, on the one hand, and the early community, or Paul or John,
on the other hand. That the differences are there no one who views the
literature historically can deny or conceal, but whether the differences are of
absolute significance systematically is quite another question. My criticism of
the whole liberal theology, including Harnack, is that it had no real
systematic theology; it believed in the results of historical research in a
wrong way. Therefore, its systematic utterances were comparatively poor. But at
that time they had meaning for many people.
520 A History of Christian Thought
D. MISCELLANEOUS MOVEMENTS IN
THEOLOGY Now a few other movements must be dealt with very sketchily.
1. The Luther-Renaissance
The Luther-Renaissance was a movement which happened within the
Ritschlian school itself, and gave to this school a greater dimension of depth.
When Luther was rediscovered, it became clear that Luther's God was not the
moralistically reduced Cod of liberal theology. Luther's God is the hidden God,
the unknown God, the God in whom the darkness of life is rooted as well as the
light, the God who is seen in terms of the voluntaristic line of thinking to
which we referred in a previous lecture. This was very important for it
liberated the figure of Luther from a kind of popular distortion; it showed the
tremendous inner forces in the great revolutionary, the first reformer whose
breakthrough was the root of all the reformatory movements, including
Zwingli's and Calvin's and those of the radical evangelicals. This all happened
on the basis of the Ritschlian school, but it resulted in an inner deepening of
it.
2.Biblical Realism
There was another school which was in a certain respect a biblicistic
reaction against Ritschuianism, but it was not a biblicism bound to the
inspiration doctrine and other fundamentalist tenets. The inspiration doctrine
had been given up except by a few fundamentalists in Germany. Rather, it was a
biblical realism which was much more adequate to human nature, just as Luther
was much more relevant to the human nature than the moralistically determined
individual personality of the late nineteenth century ever could imagine. One
of those responsible for this biblical realism was Martin Kähler, and along
with him were his friends Adolf Schiatter, Wilhelm Lutgert, and Hermann Cremer.
Their weakness was that in spite of their biblical realism and their
understanding of the deeper aspects of human nature in the light of the
New Ways of Mediation 521
Bible, they resisted the
historical criticism. It was not possible to justify this resistance, because
historical criticism was a matter of scientific honesty. Whether one was more
conservative or more radical in the historical investigation of the biblical
literature, the methods had to be accepted in the long run. I myself
experienced a real crisis in my development after I left Halle where this kind
of biblicism was firmly established, and began independently to study the
history of biblical criticism. It was especially in studying Albert
Schweitzer's history of research into the life of Jesus that I became convinced
of the inadequacy of the kind of biblicism in which the historical questions
are not taken seriously. This experience prevented me from remaining silent
about the historical critical problems in face of the Barthian influence during
the years of the church struggle in Germany. Barth silenced these problems
almost completely in his own school, and when I came to America theologians
here were not worried about them either.
But
genuine problems cannot be ignored in the long run. The explosion produced by
Bultmann was not so much due to anything new that he did, but to the fact that
he brought to the surface problems which had been suppressed by the Barthian
school. Of course, Bultmann had his own particular kind of radical criticism,
but there was nothing methodologically new in the situation ever since historical
criticism arose two hundred years ago. The explosion came when Bultmann wrote
his article on demythologizing, "New Testament and Mythology."6 This shock might have been much
less severe if the German theologians—and others too—had realized all along the
impossibility of disregarding the historical approach in New Testament
interpretation.
3.
Radical Criticism
The
increase of radicalism in historical criticism undercut the pre-suppositions
resuppositions of Harnack and the
whole liberal theology. The presupposition of Harnack's What Is
Christianity? was that one can arrive at a
5 The
Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by W. Montgomery (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910).
6 Rudolf
Bultmann, Kerygnsa and Myth, Vol. I, edited by H. W. Hartsch, translated
by Reginald Fuller (London: S.P.C.K., 1954).
522 A History of Christian Thought
fairly accurate
picture of the empirical man, Jesus of Nazareth, guaranteed by the methods of
historical science. One can arrive, that is, at a definition of original
Christianity by deleting all the additions of the early congregations and of
Paul and John. But it turned out that this was not possible.
Radical historical criticism began first with the Old Testament. Previously
the Old Testament had been read in the old Luther Bible in which certain
passages had been printed in large letters. These were the consoling passages
or those specially related to the New Testament fulfillment of prophecy. The
confidence in this way of reading the Old Testament was broken by the
Welihausen hypothesis. This was an event of great religious significance. Now
the Old Testament could be read not as a collection of edifying words printed
in big letters, but as a real development in history, as the history of
revelation, in which the divine and the human are both involved.
New Testament criticism proceeded in an even more radical way. If
Harnack could speak about Jesus in terms of God and the soul, as he did, then
the problem was: What about the inner self-consciousness of Jesus? What was
Jesus' understanding of himself? The answer to this is largely dependent on the
"Son of Man" concept in the Gospels. What did this mean in Jesus' own
mind? Did he apply it to himself, and if so, in what Sense? And if not, what
did the early Christians mean by it? The two possible ways of answering this
question were presented by Albert Schweitzer in the conclusion of his book, The
Quest of the Historical Jesus. One of the ways is presented and defended by
Schweitzer himself. It is the solution of thoroughgoing eschatology. Jesus
considered himself as an eschatological, apocalyptic figure, identifying
himself with the Son of Man in the sense of Daniel. Here the Son of Man is an
emissary of God standing before the divine throne, then leaving it to descend
into the evils of this eon and to bring in a new age. Then Schweitzer goes on
to describe the catastrophe when Jesus cried out from the cross, feeling that
God had abandoned him. Jesus had expected that Cod in his power would intervene
to save him and the world, but to no avail. This is the one version.
There are many other versions. But the other one that Schweitzer
contrasted with his own is that of radical historical skepticism, represented
by Wilhelm Wrede and later by Bultmann himself. Skepticism
New Ways of Mediation 523
here
does not
mean doubt about Cod, the world, and man, but doubt about the possibility of
reaching the historical Jesus by our historical methods. My own heritage has
been this school of historical skepticism. If Schweitzer's apocalyptic
interpretation of Jesus is not right, we must admit that we are in a position
where we cannot know very much about the historical Jesus. This radical
situation is the background for my own attempt to answer the systematic
question how we can say that Jesus is the Christ if historical research can
never reach a sure image of the historical Jesus. The second volume of my Systematic
Theology is an attempt to draw out the consequences for systematic theology
created by this skeptical attitude to the New Testament generally and to the
historical Jesus in particular.
4. Rudolf Bultmann
We
can deal with a certain aspect of Bultmann's work while we are on this subject
of historical criticism. If you read his History of the Synoptic Tradition,7 you will see the radicalism of
his skepticism, and why he is unable to reach conservative results. But for
systematic theology the question is not whether the results are more or less
conservative or radical. Historians who oppose Bultmann because they are a bit
more conservative use the same method he does. The two poles of conservatism or
radicalism in criticism do not mean a thing for systematic theology, because a
conservative criticism, as much as a radical criticism, can never get beyond
probabilities on historical matters. Whether we are offered more positive or
more negative probabilities does not make any difference for the fundamental
problem of systematic theology.
In
this connection we can make some remarks about the so-called new quest of the
historical Jesus carried on by some of Bultmann's followers. They are obviously
more optimistic with respect to the probabilities, but no change results for the
systematic situation. Our knowledge of the historical Jesus never gets beyond
probabilities of one kind or another.
Bultmann
has combined his radical historical research with a systematic attempt. He
calls this systematic attempt "demythologization." He means by this
expression that we must liberate the biblical message from
7Translated by John Marsh (New
York Harper & Row, 1963).
524 A History of Christian Thought
the
mythological language in which it is expressed so that the modern man who does
not share the biblical world view can honestly accept the biblical message.
This, as I said, amounted to a real explosion in the theological world because
the Barthian influence had suppressed the radical critical questions of biblical
interpretation. So Bultmann's name became central in the theological debates.
Since you all know what Bultmann is trying to do, Jet me give you here
merely my mild criticism of It. I feel that on most points I am on Bultmann's
side. But he does not know the meaning of myth. He does not know that religious
language is and always must be mythological. Even when he says that God has
acted in Jesus in order to confront us with the possibility of decision for or
against authentic existence, this is a symbolic or mythological way of
speaking. lie resists admitting this; he cannot go beyond it. I have often
stated that he should speak not of demythologization but of ciclitcralization,
which means not taking the symbols as literal expressions of events in time and
space. This is something indeed that has to be done because the possibility of
presenting the Christian message to the pagans of our time depends on it, and
all of us are among these pagans by virtue of at least half of our education.
We are all on the boundary line between humanism and Christianity. We cannot
even speak to ourselves honestly in biblical terms unless we are able to dclitcralize
them.
While this is the importance of Bultmann, he is not able to bring this
into a real systematic structure, not even with the help of Heidegger's
existentialism. But this existentialism does help him to show the existential
character of the New Testament concepts. The existentialist interpretation of
the New Testament deals with the concepts of anxiety, care, guilt, and
emptiness, and this is important. I have also applied an existentialist
interpretation of biblical texts in all the sermons I have preached. But
Bultmann is not able to present all this in a real systematic structure.
5. The History-of-Religions Approach
Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) was the first great critic from the point of
view of the history of religions. He was primarily an Old Testament scholar,
but his method and results had implications for New
New Ways of Mediation 525
Testament scholarship.
In Germany we call the movement in which he participated the Religionsgeschichtlicheschule,
one word for the "school of the history of religions." This was
not a school in the sense that there was special interest in the living
religions like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc., but it was a method of
analyzing the contents of the biblical writings. It tried to discover the
extent to which both the Old and New Testaments are dependent on the religious
symbolism of the surrounding religions. This, of course, excludes the Asian
religions as well as Islam, which came much later, but it includes the
religions of Persia, Egypt, and Assyria; it includes the primitive forms of
religion and especially the mystery religions which grew up in the Hellenistic
world. To what extent are the biblical writings dependent on these pre-Jewish
and pre-Christian religious movements?
Gunkel's approach and discoveries had a tremendous influence. I believe
that Gunkel's Commentary on Genesis" is still the classic work
which shows the influence of the pagan religions on the Old Testament books. It
traces the motifs of the primitive pagan religions which appear in the Genesis
stories. It demonstrates how the Jewish spirit, how prophetism and later the
priestly writers transformed the pagan myths and purified them under the impact
of the prophetic spirit. All this has given us a much better understanding of
the Old Testament.
The same thing was done with the New Testament. The surrounding
contemporary religions influenced the writers of the New Testament. The
influence from the apocalyptic period is obvious. Certain concepts are related
to the mystery religions. The term "Lord" (kyrios) itself may
have some connection with the mystery religions. Nobody can deal with the New
Testament today in a scholarly way if he is not aware of this situation. There
are always differences of scholarly opinion on these questions, but the
approach itself must be taken seriously.
Question: It seems that most of the systematic theologians that we have
studied this quarter have faltered at the point where they talk about or fail
to talk about the problem of sin. Can such a generalization
8 Genesis übersetzt und erklärt (Gottingen: Varsdenhoek and
Ruprecht, 1901). Cf. his The Legends of Genesis, translated by W. H.
Carruth (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1901). This book is a
translation of the Introduction to the author's Commentary on Genesis.
526 A History of Christian Thought
be made in any
true sense, and if so does it have any particular significance for the
theological enterprise?
Answer: This is not true of the theologians of mediation. We did discuss
Schleiermacher's doctrine of sin and pointed out its shortcomings. He derived
sin in an evolutionary way from the inadequacies of man's mental development in
contrast to his bodily development. In the Ritschlian school too sin did not
receive its full significance because it was described in a similar way as the
conflict between man's selfhood and his natural basis. Salvation was then
conceived of as the spiritual power of man overcoming his natural basis. For
the Ritschlian school salvation was especially forgiveness of sins, but not
transformation, for the idea of the Spirit being present in man and
transforming him was very remote from Ritschlian thinking. So the
generalization is true with respect to the leading theologians whom we
discussed. But this is not true of the theologians of mediation, some of whom
we touched on very briefly. I left out one theologian who is very important
on the doctrine of sin. I lis name is Julius MUller (1801-1878). lie earned for
himself the additional name sin-Muller because he wrote a very large and
classical work on the doctrine of sin," especially in terms of Schelling's
philosophy. And, of course, when we dealt with the existentialist philosophers
and theologians, we showed their grasp of the situation of human estrangement.
Kierkegaard especially was discussed in this connection; his idea that sin
presupposes itself, his concept of the transition from innocence to guilt and
the problem of sickness unto death are all profound aspects of the reality of
sin. There is a strong tradition of understanding the depth of sin in the
theologians of mediation, much profounder than in both Schleiermacher and
Ritschl.
6. Ernst Troeltsch
With only one lecture left, we are going to have to limit ourselves to a
few remarks on four subjects. The first is the thought of Ernst
The Christian Doctrine of Sin, translated by William Urwick
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1868).
New Ways of Mediation 527
Troeltsch, who
was formerly my colleague in the University of Berlin and whom I consider in a
special way as one of my teachers, although I never heard him lecture.
Secondly, I want to talk about the foundations of religious socialism in
Germany. Thirdly, about Karl Barth, and fourthly about existentialist motifs.
I will speak first of Troeltsch as a philosopher of religion. His main
problem dealt with the meaning of religion in the context of the human spirit
or man's mental structure. Here Troeltsch followed Kant by accepting his three
critiques, but he said that there is not only the theoretical a priori, man's
categorical structure, as Kant developed it in the Critique of Pure Reason, not only the moral, as Kant
developed it in the Critique of Practical Reason, and not only the aesthetic, as he
developed it in the Critique of Judgment, but there is also a religious a
priori. This means that there is something which belongs to the structure
of the human mind itself from which religion arises. It is essentially present,
although always only potentially as with the other three structures. Whether
it becomes actualized in time and space is another question, but if it is
actualized it has its own kind of certainty as the others have. It is an a
priori. To say that it is a priori does not mean that it is to be
understood temporally, as if all the Kantian categories are clear in the
consciousness of a new born baby. This is not what a priori means. What
it means is that if somebody has the character of man, if he has a human mind
and human rational structure, then these categories develop under the impact of
experience. This is what Troeltsch tried to show in regard to the religious a
priori. I would say that on this point he stands in the great tradition of
the Franciscan Augustinian school of the Middle Ages. It is impossible for me
to understand how we could ever come to a philosophical understanding of
religion without finding a point in the structure of man as man in which the
finite and the infinite meet or are within each other.
In his book, The Absoluteness of Christianity,10 Troeltsch criticizes Harnack's
famous book, What Is Christianity? He asks, What is the essence of Christianity
and whence do we derive it? Is it the classical period of Christianity, the
period of the apostles? Is it an abstraction
10 Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929).
528 A History of Christian Thought
from all the
periods, by using the Aristotelian method which abstracts from all the concrete
realities in order to reach the essence? In either case we are confronted by
impossibilities, because in history there is not such an essence. History is
open toward the future. If one wants to speak of an essence, one can do so only
by anticipating the entire future, which is impossible. For this reason he
denied the possibility of finding an essence.
Trocltsch was not only a philosopher of history; he was also a man with
great historical vision. I remember the excitement which was aroused when he
published a great essay on the meaning of Protes-tantisrn in relation to the
modern world.11 In this particular article he wrote about the medieval character of
early Protestantism and challenged the idea that Protestantism had brought an
end to the medieval world, He tried to show that early Protestantism had all
the medieval characteristics, instead, the Middle Ages came to an end only with
the Enlightenment. This, of course, was a fundamental expression of what one
usually calls liberal Protestantism.
Trocltsch's philosophy of history is rooted in a negative attitude
toward what he calls "historism," or perhaps in English one might
call it "historicism." In any case, it is an attitude of
relativism toward history. For historicism, history is mere observation of the
past. It is not an attitude of participation in history and of making decisions
which are decisive for the course of history. At the end of the nineteenth
century under the influence of historicism history was at best an interesting
subject to be observed with a detached attitude. I know people who have carried
this attitude with them into the twentieth century and have remained
historicists in this respect. Now, Troeltsch tried to overcome this by an
interesting construction. He asked the question: What is the aim of history?
Toward what is history running? That aim would determine the meaning of
history. But he denied the possibility of knowing or giving such an aim. He
said that we can only speak of the concrete historical structure in which we
are living. This was certainly an
11 Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of
Protestantism to the Modern World, translated by W. Montgomery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); translated
from the German edition of 1911, Die Bedeutung des Protes-tantismus für die
Entstehung der Modernen Welt.
New Ways of Mediation 529
advance over
historicism. He was not only an observer; he also wanted to transform history.
But he did this in a limited way. He said that our task is to care for the
immediate next stage of history, and he called this Europeanism. It coincides
with what we today call the Western world. He included the United States as
well, of course. He did not use our expression of the Western world, because at
that time the conflict between East and West had not started. Europeanism is a
combination of Christian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Germanic elements. Christianity
is the religion of Europeanism; it belongs to the Western world. Therefore,
missions cannot have the intention of converting people in the Eastern world,
but instead of fostering the interpenetration of the great religions. He was
the president of a special missionary society guided by the liberal theology,
and as president of this society, he developed his concept of missions, namely,
the interpenetration of cultures and religions. This means that the idea of the
absoluteness of Christianity—whatever this questionable concept may mean—would
have to be given up. Christianity was relativized by limiting it to the Western
culture, by making it the religion of Europeanism. Christianity and Western
culture belong to each other, but with respect to the Eastern culture, the best
that we could hope for is the interpenetration of the religions.
The
next point we wish to discuss is of the highest importance for theology. The
history of theology in the past had usually been discussed as the history of
dogma or of the doctrinal statements of the church. This was the case in
1-larnack too. But Troeltsch was influenced by Max Weber (1864-1920), the great
sociologist and perhaps the greatest scholar in Germany of the nineteenth
century. So Troeltsch now posed the question: What about the social teachings
of the Christian churches?12 That, in fact, is the title of his
great work. Should we not look at the dogmatic statements in the light of the
social doctrines of the churches? Perhaps we might understand the dogmatic
statements better in this light, rather than dealing with them apart from their
relation to social reality. This method was influenced by the methodological
principles of Marxism, but in a way that was counterbalanced by Max
12 The
Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, translated by Olive Wyon (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1931).
530 A History of Christian Thought
Weber's own
interpretation of the relation of thought to social reality. For instance, Max
Weber tried to show that Calvinism had a tremendous influence on the way in
which the capitalistic rulers gained their fortunes and ran their factories by
a personal inner-worldly asceticism as called for by the Calvinist ethic.
Troeltsch's method was thus a two-way street. On the one side was the
understanding that all doctrines are dependent on social conditions and cannot
be understood apart from these social conditions. This was the Marxist side.
But on the other side was the equally important insight that the way in which
the social conditions are used by people is largely dependent on their ultimate
concern, by their religious convictions and their ethical implications. In
this way he together with Max Weber tried to give a new key to the
interpretation of the history of religion.
These are the main points in dealing with Troeltsch, and, as I told you,
I have been deeply influenced by these ideas. But in two respects I already
belonged to a new generation. Many of us were not satisfied with the way in
which Troeltsch tried to overcome historicism. We felt that he himself was
still under its power. The other point at which we departed from Troeltsch had
to do with the existentialism that arose in the meantime. Troeltsch was not at
all in touch with these existentialist ideas. Ultimately he came from the
Ritschlian school, and the Ritschlian school was a rationalistic essentialism.
While attempting to overcome these limitations of Troeltsch, we remained always
grateful for the often devastating criticism which he leveled at many traditional
forms of Christian theology, lie taught us a kind of freedom which
transcended the often narrow biblicistic attitude of the Ritschlian school and
of liberal theology, which despite its liberalism often hangs on to a pietistic
biblicistic element.
7. Religious Socialism
Religious socialism can be seen as an attempt to overcome the limitations
of Troeltsch's effort to overcome historicism. I would like to have had time to
trace the underlying sources of religious socialism. These
New Ways of Mediation 531
sources are in
the line of development that includes men like Boehme, Schelling, Oetinger, and
generally a tradition of biblical realism which was neither orthodox or
fundamentalist, on the one hand, nor pietistic, on the other hand, and which
transcended the doctrinal Lutheranism by its closeness to social and political
realities. The fundamental ideas in this line have become very important in our
days again. Accordingly, we emphasize that God is related to the world and not
only to the individual and his inner life and not only to the church as a
sociological entity. God is related to the universe, and this includes nature,
history, and personality. May I add that Martin Kahler and Adolf Schlatter were
also in this line of thought. They stressed the freedom of God to act apart
from the church in either its orthodox or pietistic form. They were also
emancipated from the moralistic transformation of religion in the escapist
theology of Ritschlianism.
There are two names we must mention, the Blumhardts, father and son:
Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805--1880) and Christoph Blum-hardt (1842-1919). Both of them were ministers, and
the son later became a political leader of the socialist movement. The father
Blum-hardt, as he is called, was a man who felt he had the power to expel
demonic forces. He practiced healing in his parish in Bad Boll in Wurttemberg.
He did it in a way that the Synoptic stories say that Jesus did it, not with
faith healing, which is mostly a matter of magical concentration, but with the
power of the divine Spirit radiating from him. From this experience he came to
the realization that God is a healing God, that he has something to do with the
world and all the dimensions of reality and not only with the inner conversion
of the human soul.
The son Blumhardt applied these ideas to the social realities. His
special emphasis was that God loved the world, not only the church and not only
Christians. He fought against the egocentricism of the individualistic type of
religion which characterized pietistic Lutheranism at that time. For this
reason he participated in the socialist movement which was becoming more
powerful at the turn of the century. He did this in terms of an inner
historical understanding of the kingdom of God, without giving up the
transcendent fulfillment of the kingdom of God, as the social gospel theology
in this country often tended to do. He could say that the works of those who do
not know God are often
532 A History of Christian Thought
greater works
for God than those which are done in the church by Christians in the name of
God.
These are the ideas which we later developed in the religious socialist
movement, and I remember that we represented them also at the Oxford Conference
in 1937, which was one of the important conferences of the modern ecumenical
movement. At that time I was chairman of a small committee which included among
others some Eastern Orthodox theologians. Our task was to make a statement
about the relation of the church to socialism and communism. We presented a
report under rather dramatic conditions to the plenary assembly of the
conference, in which we stated that often God speaks to the church more
directly from outside the church, through those who are enemies of religion and
Christianity, than within the church, through those who are official
representatives of the churches. We related this to the revolutionary movements
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially to the socialist
movement. This was accepted almost without any changes by the Oxford Assembly.
Although this was a step of great significance, it was too early for it.
'Today if the National Council of Churches or the World Council of Churches
should make such a statement, it would be heard and understood, and perhaps
attacked by some. But at that time this type of statement was so far in advance
of the actual situation that it was almost forgotten. Thus, out of the
experience and insight of people like the l3lumhardts a new understanding of
the relation of the church to society was opened up in an unheard-of way in
most of the European churches. Religious socialism was one of the movements
which mediated this new power and vision.
In this connection we might say something about Pope John XXIII. He was
able to criticize the church, his own church, and could declare publicly how
the church had become irrelevant for many people in our time. He has shown us
that the spirit of prophetism which can criticize the religious group in which
the prophet lives has not completely died out in the Roman Church. It is still
there and surprisingly has been voiced from the top of the hierarchy from where
one would least expect it. The other thing that he has done is to make it
possible to reach out to those outside the churches, not only to the
"separated brethren" outside the Roman Catholic Church, but to the
secularists and even to those
New Ways of Mediation 533
who are enemies of the
church and Christianity. On the basis of my own religious socialist past I feel
a kinship with him. He shares the prophetic self-criticism which is open to the
truth which has been forgotten in the church and which is now represented
against the church by the secular and the anti-religious movements of our time.
The
immediate predecessors of the religious socialist movement were in Switzerland,
Hermann Kutter (1869-1931) and Leonhard Ragaz, (1868-1945), both
of whom you will learn about in every biography of Karl Barth. Both fought for
justice and peace in the name of Christianity, Kutter more prophetically and
Ragaz more politically. It is important to remember that Karl Barth himself was
a part of the religious socialist movement before he made his great break with
all such movements. We tried to develop a special type of religious socialism
in Germany after the first World War which took into account the particular
historical situation in Germany. With the revolution of 1919 in Germany,
the country was split into the labor movements and the traditional churches,
which were practically all Lutheran, except in the West where there is some
Calvinist influence. The problem we faced after the first World War was how to
overcome the split between Lutheran transcendentalism and the secular
utopianism in the socialist groups. The Lutheran idea was that the world is
somehow in the hands of the devil, and that the only counter-power here is the
authority of the state. Therefore revolutionary movements were entirely denied
and the idea of transforming society in the name of God received no response in
the German Lutheran tradition. The secular idea was that the revolution is
right around the corner. Its coming is a matter of scientific calculation; it
does not even require much political action. This secular idea has nothing
transcendent in it, but only believes that if socialism is achieved, all human
problems will be solved.
These
were the two poles between which we moved as religious socialists at that time.
Our answer to the situation was given in terms of some basic concepts. The
first was the concept of the demonic. Our interpretation dealt with the
demonic structures of evil in individuals and social groups. When we first used
the concept of the demonic in the early twenties, nobody had heard of it except
in history books in connection with the superstitious kinds of belief in
demons. We used the word
534 A History of Christian Thought
"demonic"
to describe the structures of destruction which prevail over the
creative elements. The experiential basis of this was the psychological
description of the compulsive powers in individuals and the sociological
description as given in the Marxist analysis of the bourgeois society. The
structures in society are creative and destructive at the same time.
Then we went on to say in terms of the concept of kairos that
when the demonic power is recognized and fought against, there takes place a
breakthrough of the eternal into history. Kairos means time, the right
time, the qualitative time in contrast to chronos, clock time,
quantitative time. The idea of the kairos is a biblical idea attached in
particular to the biblical messages of John the Baptist and Jesus and to Paul's
interpretation of history. For us this concept was the main mediating concept
between the two extremes. Against the Lutheran transcendentalism kairos means
that the eternal can break into the temporal and that a new beginning can take
place. Against utopianism we knew of the fragmeritariness of historical
achievements. No perfect end is reached in history free of the demonic. We
expressed this sometimes in the symbol from the hook of Revelation, the idea of
the millennium; the demonic forces are banned for a thousand years, but they
are not overcome. They will return from their prison in the underworld. This is
highly mythological, but yet profound. It says that the demonic can be
conquered for a time; a particular demonic structure can be overcome. But the demonic
always returns, just as Jesus described in the case of the individual into
whom more demons rush after the one has been cast out.
The third concept was the idea of theonomy. We said that the aim of the
religious socialist movement was a theonomous state of society. Theonomy goes
beyond autonomy, which is empty critical thought. It goes beyond heteronomy,
which means authoritarianism and enslavement. Theonomy is the union of what is
true in autonomy and in heteronomy, the fulfillment of a whole society with the
spiritual substance, in spite of the freedom of the autonomous development, and
in spite of living in the great traditions in which the Spirit has embodied
himself. This was our answer. And we found that in the twelfth century of
Europe there was something very close to theonomy, represented especially by
the Franciscan-Augustinian school in theology.
New Ways of Mediation 535
Do not misunderstand me! We never said like the romantics that the
Middle Ages was such a great period. People were evil then as always. But the
structure of society had elements of theonomy in it. The entire life was
concentrated in the great cathedrals; the whole of daily life was consecrated
in the cathedral. This is what I mean by theonomy. If you go to Europe and see
the genuinely creative products of this theonomy —not the pseudo-Gothic
imitations that we have elsewhere in the world—then you can see how the whole
life in these little towns—like Chartres near Paris—was arranged under the
vertical line which drives up to the ultimate.
The religious socialist movement never was a movement for higher wages,
etc., although there was much to be done in this respect. This was an
incredibly exploitative situation. But it tried to re-establish the vertical
line in new forms. In this respect I would say that the situation has not
changed since 1920. The same problem exists in this country, not in the same
social structure, but in the same spiritual structure. There is still a lack of
the vertical line, the lack of a theonomous culture.
When religious nationalism arose in the context of the Nazi movement,
it used at the beginning some of the ideas of religious socialism in order to
make the demonic elevation of a finite reality to ultimacy religiously
acceptable in Germany. In the first years of Hitler—when it was still possible
to fight intellectually—I had to resist this misappropriation of concepts that
we had used for a different purpose. If we had time we would also like to deal
with religious pacifism and the social gospel movement in this country.
Largely, the form of pacifism which I found when I came to this country in 1933
has been overcome because of the second World War in which only power could
resist the demonic elevation of Nazism, and because of the type of theological
interpretation given by Reinhold Niebuhr of the complex human situation.
8. Karl Barth
We will deal especially with the beginning of the development of Karl
Barth. As I said, he came out of the religious socialist movement in Switzerland,
but he did not join this movement in Germany. On the
536 A History of Christian Thought
contrary, he
recognized the danger, which was a real danger as the abuse of religious
socialism by religious nationalism showed, that the Christian message will he identified
with a particular political or social idea. Whether it be nationalism, or
socialism, or democracy, or "the American way of life," which happens
to be identified with the Christian message, Karl Barth would see these things
as idolatrous. He saw the danger of idolatry much more clearly than the other
danger of a divorce between church and society which we saw when we started the
religious socialist movement. Therefore, he attacked all these movements,
including religious socialism. In a sense this was itself a dangerous thing to
do, because the Lutheran students in Germany were only too willing to leave the
social problems alone to retreat into problems of systematic theology and
biblical research. He broke the attempt to bridge the gap from the side of
theology between the revolutionary labor movement and the church in Germany.
This break became very clear to me when I saw, while a professor in Marburg,
how the students after the first World War turned away from the great social
problems created by the catastrophes of the War and settled hack in their
sanctuaries of theological discussions.
Nevertheless, in view of the situation which came later, what Barth did
was providentially significant, for it saved Protestantism from the onslaught
of the neo-collectivistic and pagan Nazism. Barth's theology is also called
neo-Reformation theology, and is related to the rediscovery of Luther in the
Ritschlian tradition, but it goes considerably deeper than the Ritschlians in
the understanding of Luther and the doctrines of sin and grace. His theology
was also called in the beginning the theology of crisis. Crisis can mean two
things. In the one sense it means the historical crisis of bourgeois society
in Central Europe after the first World War. Some of this was in Barth's
theology, but very little. He elevated this occasional crisis, which happens at
a given time in history, into a universal crisis of the relationship between
the eternal and the temporal. The crisis is always the crisis of the temporal
in the power of the eternal. This is the human situation in every period. But
in this way too the interest in the social elements in the post-War period
waned in the Barthian school in favor of the doctrinal elements.
Barth did all this in the name of
his fundamental principle, the
New Ways of Mediation 537
absoluteness of
God. God is not an object of our knowledge or action. He expressed this in his
commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans,13 a book of great
prophetic paradoxes; it was received in Germany and in all Europe as a
prophetic book. It is not exegesis of Romans measured by strict historical
standards, and he admitted this. But it was an attempt to restate the
paradoxical character of the absolute transcendence of God which we can never reach
from our side, which we can never bring down to earth by our efforts or our
knowledge, which either comes to us or does not come to us. All our attempts to
reach God are defined as religion, and against religion stands God's act of
revelation. Here began the fight against the use of the word
"religion" in theology.
When I returned to Germany in 1948 after the Hitler period, I was
immediately attacked when I used the word "religion" in my writings
or speeches, because religion was still felt after Barth's struggle with the
Nazi Christians as an expression of human arrogance, a human attempt to reach
up to the divine. In the meantime, however, it has come to be understood that
revelation can reach man only in the form of receiving it, and every reception
of it, whether more inwardly religious or more openly secular, is religion, and
as religion is always humanly distorted. But in the earlier period Karl Barth
did not acknowledge this; he identified revelation with the Christian message,
and denied the revelatory character of everything except the Christian
revelation. Therefore, he denied all natural theology. His famous controversy
with Emil Brunner about the point of contact in man was the occasion for his
most outspoken rejection of natural theology. It was not so much an attack on
the whole system of Thomistic natural theology, for this was not necessary to
do. But the idea which he attacked was that there is something in man as man
which makes it possible for God to be recognized as God by man. What Troeltsch
tried to formulate with his idea of the religious a priori was the
object of his attack. Barth claimed that the image of God in man is totally
destroyed. This immediately involved him in an attack on mysticism, following
here the line of Ritschl and Harnack. He negated every point of identity
between God and man, even in the doctrine of the Spirit who might be dwelling
in man. He
13 The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1933).
538 A History of Christian Thought
said not that I
believe, but that I believe that I believe; the Spirit is not in me, but is
against me. But the question how can God appear to man at all remained
unanswered in these ideas.
Barth's theology has also been called dialectical. But this word is very
misleading. In its prophetic beginnings it was paradoxical, and later its
conceptualization became supernaturalistic. But it is not dialectical.
Dialectic involves an inner progress from one state to another by an inner dynamics.
From this position there follow a number of other antiliberal doctrines. The
Word of God is stressed in antithesis to Schleiermacher's idea of the religious
consciousness, and to any form of pietistic or mystical experience. The
classical christology is accepted, and the trinitarian dogma becomes his
starting point. Karl Barth starts from above, from the trinity, from the
revelation which is given, and then proceeds to man, and in his latest period,
even very deeply into man, when he speaks of the "humanity of Cod."14
Whereas, on the other hand, I start with man, not deriving the divine answer
from man, but starting with the question which is present in man and to which
the divine revelation comes as the answer.
A few more words about Barth's relation to historical criticism and to
social political movements. He silenced the problems of historical criticism
completely. The question of the historical Jesus did not touch him at all. But
problems cannot be silenced. So it happened in almost a tragic way that when
Bultmann wrote his article on demythologizing, a split in theology opened up,
and the silenced questions broke out into the open all over the theological
world. Bultmann saved the historical question from being banished from
theology. This is his importance. He showed that it Cannot be silenced, that
our whole relationship to the Bible cannot be expressed in paradoxical and
supernaturalist statements, not even if it is done with the prophetic power of
Karl Barth. But we have to ask the question of the historical meaning of the
biblical writings.
In regard to the political and social movements he detached himself not
only from religious socialism, but also for a time from the political side of
Hitler's power. He accepted it and did not speak against it in the
14 The Humanity of God, translated by John N. Thomas (Richmond:
John Knox Press, 1960).
New Ways of Mediation 539
name of
religion, although there were many occasions for doing so. For instance, on
April 1, 1933, when the first great attack against the Jews was made, with the
destruction of a vast amount of life and property, the churches kept quiet.
They did not speak up until they themselves were attacked by Hitler. This is
one of the great shortcomings of the German churches, but also of Karl Barth.
But then Barth became the leader of the inner-churchly resistance against
National Socialism. He finally came to a point where he recognized something
which he had formerly rejected, namely, that the movement headed by Hitler is a
quasi-religious movement which represents an attack on Christianity. So he
wrote his famous letter to the Christians in England, asking them in the name
of Christ to resist Hitler.15 This was quite different from his
earlier position.
Today Barth is more or less neutral, and in accordance with his
fundamental principles does not want to identify the cause of Christ with the
cause of the West. For this reason he is very seriously attacked by Western
churches. He would not apply his criticism of Islam and Hitler to Communism in
the same way, and thus has returned to his original position of detachment.
9. Existentialism
We have already spoken very much about existentialism in connection
with Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Feuerbach, whose revolts against
Hegel gave rise to existentialist elements in their thought. They are the
sources of present-day existentialism. But existentialism is not only a revolt;
it is also a style. Existentialism has become the style of all great
literature, of the arts and the other media of our self-expression. It is
present in poetry, in the novel, in drama, in the visual arts, and it is my
opinion that our century will in historical retrospect be characterized as the
period of existentialism.
We must first try to define the term. It is a way of looking at man. But
there are two possible ways of looking at man. The one way is essentialist
which develops the doctrine of man in terms of his essential
'This Christian Cause, A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1941).
540 A History of Christian Thought
nature within
the whole of the universe. The other way is existentialist which looks at man
in his predicament in time and space, and sees the conflict between what exists
in time and space and what is essentially given. Religiously expressed, this is
the conflict between the essential goodness of man, the highest point of which
is his freedom to contradict his essential goodness, and man's fall into the
conditions of existential estrangement. This is a universal situation, and at
the same time man is responsible for it.
Existentialist philosophy is a revolt against the predominance of the
essentialist element in most of the history of Western philosophy. It represents
a revival of the existentialist elements of earlier thought in Plato, in the
Bible, in Augustine, Duns Scotus, Jacob Boehme, etc. In the great philosophers
of the past we usually find a preponderance of the essentialist approach, but
always with existentialist elements within them. Plato in this regard is a
classical figure. His realm of ideas or essences is a realm of essentialism, of
essentialist description and analysis. But Plato's existentialism appears in
his myth of the human soul in prison, of coming down from the world of essences
into the body which is its prison, and then being liberated from the cave. The
essentialist element became most powerfully expressed in Hegel and in the great
synthesis. But there were also hidden existentialist elements in Hegel which his
pupils brought out finally against him and thus inaugurated the generations of
existentialism in revolt. And finally, in our century existentialism has become
a style. Therefore, to repeat, first existentialism appears as an element,
then as a revolt, and finally as a style. That is where we are today.
This rediscovery of existentialism has a great significance for
theology. It has seen the dark elements in man as over against a philosophy of
consciousness which lays all the stress on man's conscious decisions and his
good will. The existentialists allied themselves with Freud's analysis of the
unconscious in protest against a psychology of consciousness which had
previously existed. Existentialism and psychotherapeutic psychology are natural
allies and have always worked together. This rediscovery of the unconscious in
man is of the highest importance for theology. It has changed the moralistic
and idealistic types which we have discussed; it has placed the question of the
human condition at the
New Ways of Mediation 541
center of all
theological thinking, and for this reason it has made the answers meaningful
again. In this light we can say that existentialism and Freud, together with
his followers and friends, have become the providential allies of Christian
theology in the twentieth century. This is similar to the way in which the
Marxist analysis of the structure of society became a tremendous factor in
arousing the churches to a sense of responsibility for the social conditions in
which men live.
Often
I have been asked if I am an existentialist theologian, and my answer is always
short. I say, fifty-fifty. This means that for me essentialism and
existentialism belong together. It is impossible to be a pure essentialist if
one is personally in the human situation and not sitting on the throne of God
as Hegel implied he was doing when he construed world history as coming to an
end in principle in his philosophy. This is the metaphysical arrogance of pure
essentialism. For the world is still open to the future, and we are not on the
throne of God, as Karl Barth has said in his famous statement: God is in heaven
and man is on earth.
On
the other hand, a pure existentialism is impossible because to describe
existence one must use language. Now language deals with universals. In using
universals, language is by its very nature essentialist, and cannot escape it.
All attempts to reduce language to mere noises or utterances would bring man
back to the animal level on which universals do not exist. Animals cannot
express universals. But man can and must express his encounter with the world
in terms of universals. Therefore, there is an essentialist framework in his
mind. Existentialism is possible only as an element in a larger whole, as an
element in a vision of the structure of being in its created goodness, and then
as a description of man's existence within that framework. The conflicts
between his essential goodness and his existential estrangement cannot be seen
at all without keeping essentialism and existentialism together. Theology must
see both sides, man's essential nature, wonderfully and symbolically expressed
in the paradise story, and man's existential condition, under sin, guilt, and
death.
