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11] A History of Christian Thought Paul Tillich Ch 5 New Ways of Mediation

 A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism by Paul Tillich | Goodreads





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 
A history of Christian thought and Perspectives on 19th and 20th century Protestant theology.

Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone 
(first published January 1st 1968)
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URL  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich

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 The Concept of Dogma xxxvi

I]The Preparation for Christianity 1
A. The Kairos 1
B. The Universalism of the Roman Empire 2
C. Hellenistic Philosophy 3
1. Skepticism 3
2. The Platonic Tradition 6
3. The Stoics 7
4. Eclecticism 9
D. The Inter-Testamental Period 9
E. The Mystery Religions 13
F. The Method of the New Testament 14

II Theological Developments in the Ancient Church 17
A. The Apostolic Fathers 17
B. The Apologetic Movement 24
1. The Christian Philosophy 27
2. God and the Logos 29
C. Gnosticism 33
D. The Anti-Gnostic Fathers 37
1. The System of Authorities 38
2. The Montanist Reaction 40
3. God the Creator 41
4. The History of Salvation 43
5. Trinity and Cliristology 46
6. The Sacrament of Baptism 48
E. Neo-Platonism 50
F. Clement and Origen of Alexandria 55
1. Christianity and Philosophy 55
2. The Allegorical Method 57
3. The Doctrine of God 59
vi Contents
4. Christology 61
5. Eschatology 63
G. Dynamic and Modalistic Monarchianism 64
1. Paul of Samosata 65
2. Sabellius 66
H. The Trinitarian Controversy 68
1. Arianism 69
2. The Council of Nicaea 71
3. Athanasius and Marcellus 73
4. The Cappadocian Theologians 76
I. The Christological Problem 79
1. The Antiochean Theology 80
2. The Alexandrian Theology 84
3. The Council of Chalcedon 86
4. Leontius of Byzantium 88
J. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 90
K. Tertullian and Cyprian 98
'L. The Life and Thought of Augustine 103
1. The Development of Augustine 104
2. Augustine's Epistemology 111
3. The Idea of God 115
4. The Doctrine of Man 119
5. Philosophy of History 121
6. The Pelagian Controversy 122
7. The Doctrine of the Church 131

III Trends in the Middle Ages 134
A. Scholasticism, Mysticism, Biblicism 135
B. The Scholastic Method 137
C. Trends in Scholasticism 140
1. Dialectics and Tradition 140
2. Augustinianism and Aristotelianism 141
3. Thomism and Sootism 141
4. Nominalism and Realism 142
5. Pantheism and Church Doctrine 144
D. The Religious Forces 145
E. The Medieval Church 149
F. The Sacraments 154
G. Anselm of Canterbury 158
H. Abelard of Paris 167
I. Bernard of Clairvaux 172
J. Joachim of Floris 175

K. The Thirteenth Century 180
L. The Doctrines of Thomas Aquinas 192
M. William of Ockham 198
N. German Mysticism 201
0. The Pre-Reformers 203

IV Roman Catholicism from Trent to the Present 210
A. The Meaning of Counter-Reformation 210
B. The Doctrine of Authorities 211
C. The Doctrine of Sin 212
D. The Doctrine of Justification 213
E. The Sacraments 215
F. Papal Infallibility 218
C. Jansenism 221
II. Probahilism 223
1 11ccent Developments 224

V Ilir Iiiiiiigy iI Ihi Protestant Reformers 227
/\ Niiiiiiii I .iitIiii 227
I. Tho Itrukt Iiroiigii 227
2. I ,iiIlii'i ( iilirisrn of the Church 234
:i. I lh ( oiilIlit vlIIi iiiis,niis 237
I. Ilk Coidlicl wit ii tile Ivangelical Radicals 239
5. liii liii N I )O(t rules 242
a. iiie iihiical Principle 242
b. Sin and Faith 245
c. The Idea of God 247
d. The Doctrine of Christ 249
e. Church and State 251
B. Huldreich Zwingli 256
C. John Calvin 262
1. The Majesty of God 262
2. Providence and Predestination 264
3. The Christian Life 270
4. Church and State 272
5. The Authority of Scripture 274

VI The Development of Protestant Theology 276
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 276
1. Reason and Revelation 278
2. The Formal and Material Principles 280
B. Pietism 283
C. The Enlightenment 287

PART II
Introduction: Problem and Method 297

I Oscillating Emphases in Orthodoxy, Pietism,
and Rationalism 305
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 305
B. The Reaction of Pietism against Orthodoxy 311
C. The Rise of Rationalism 313

II The Enlightenment and its Problems 320
A. The Nature of Enlightenment 320
1. The Kantian Definition of Autonomy 320
2. Concepts of Reason 325
a. Universal Reason 326
b. Critical Reason 327
c. Intuitive Reason 328
d. Technical Reason 329
3. The Concept of Nature 330
4. The Concept of Harmony 332
B. The Attitude of the Enlightened Man 341
1. His Bourgeois Character 341
2. His Ideal of a Reasonable Religion 342
3. His Common-sense Morality 344
4. his Subjective Feeling 348
C. Intrinsic Conflicts of Enlightenment 349
1. Cosmic Pessimism 350
2. Cultural Vices 352
3. Personal Vices 353
4. Progress Based on Immorality 355
D. The Fulfillers and Critics of Enlightenment 356
1. Rousseau, The French Revolution, and Romanticism 356
1. Hume, The History of Religion, and Positivism 357
1. Kant, Moral Religion, and Radical Evil 360

III The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the
Enlightenment 367
A. Lessing, Historical Criticism, and the Rediscovery of Spinoza 367
B. The Synthesis of Spinoza and Kant 370

C. The Nature of Romanticism 372
1. The Infinite and Finite 372
2. The Emotional and the Aesthetic Elements in Romanticism 378
3. The Turn to the Past and the Valuation of Tradition 379
4. The Quest of Unity and Authority 382
5. The Negative and the Demonic in Romanticism 383

D. The Classical Theological Synthesis: Friedrich Schleiermacher 386
1. The Background of Schleicrmacher's Thought 388
2. His Concept of Religion as Feeling 391
3. His Positivistic Definition of Theology 398
4. His Interpretation of Christianity 405

E. The Universal Synthesis: Georg W. F. Hegel 410
1. The Greatness and the Tragic Hybris of Ilegels System 411
2. The Synthesis of God and Man (Mind and Person) 414
3. The Synthesis of Religion and Culture (Thought and  Imagination) 419
1. The Synthesis of State and Church 424
Providence, History, and Theodicy 426
The Christ as Reality and Symbol 430
Eternity against Immortality 431


IV The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 432

A. The Split in the Hegelian School 432
1. The Historical Problem: Strauss and Baur 423
1. The Anthropological Problem: Ludwig Feuerbach 435

B. Schelling's Criticism of Hegel 437

C. The Religious Revival and Its Theological Consequences 448
1. The Nature of the European Revival 449
2. The Theology of Repristination 453
1. Natural Science and the Fight over Darwinism 454

D. Kierkegaard's Existential Theology 458
1. Kierkegaard's Criticism of Hegel 460
2. Ethical Existence and the Human Situation (Anxiety, Despair) 462
3. The Nature of Faith (The Leap and Existential Truth) 464
4.  Criticism of Theology and Church 472

E. Political Radicalism and its Theological Significance 476
1. The Bourgeois Radicals 477
2. Marx's Relation to Hegel and Feuerbach 478
3. Marx's View of the Human Situation (Alienation) 480
4. Marx's Doctrine of Ideology and His Attack on Religion 481
5. Marx's Political Existentialism 484
6.    The Prophetic Element in Marx 485

F. Voluntarism and the Philosophy of Life 487
1. Schopenhatier's Idea of the Will 488
2. Nietzsche's Idea of Will-To-Power 493
3. Nietzsche's Doctrine of Resentment 494
1. The "Death of God" and the New Ideal of Man 497

V New Ways of Mediation 504
A. Experience and the Biblical Message 506
1. The Erlangen School 506
2. Martin Kähler 509
B. The "Back to Kant" Movement 511
C. Adolf von Harnack 515
D. Miscellaneous Movements in Theology 520
1. The Luther-Renaissance 520
2. Biblical Realism 520
3. Radical Criticism 521
4. Rudolf Bultmann 523
5. The History-of-Religions Approach 524
6. Ernst Troeltsch 526
7. Religious Socialism 530
8. Karl Barth 535
9. Existentialism 539
Index of Names 543
Index of Subjects 547
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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‑

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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

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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‑

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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‑

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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).

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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

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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).

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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

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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

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"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.

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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

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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

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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

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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.