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6] A History of Christian Thought Paul Tillich The Development of Protestant Theology

 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 VI The Development of Protestant Theology

WE shall now give a survey of the rhythm in the development of Protestant theology in the last centuries. This development is important not only from the historical point of view, but also because elements created during this period are profoundly em­bedded in our minds and souls and bodies. Although we cannot present a history of Protestant theology, we can show the various tides in its development.

A. THE PERIOD OF ORTHODOXY

The immediate wave which followed the Reformation is the period of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is greater and more serious than what is called fundamentalism in America. Fundamentalism is the product of a reaction in the nineteenth century, and is a primitivized form of classical Orthodoxy. Classical Orthodoxy had a great theology. We could also call it Protestant scholasti­cism, with all the refinements and methods which the word "scholastic" includes. Thus, when I speak of Orthodoxy, I refer to the way in which the Reformation established itself as an ecclesiastical form of life and thought after the dynamic move­ment of the Reformation came to an end. It is the systematization and consolidation of the ideas of the Reformation, and developed in contrast to the Counter-Reformation.

Orthodox theology was and still is the solid basis of all later developments, whether these developments—as was usually the case—were directed against Orthodoxy, or were attempts at restoration of it. Liberal theology to the present time has been dependent on the Orthodoxy against which it has fought. Pietism

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was dependent on the Orthodoxy which it wanted to transform into subjectivism. Past and present restoration movements try to recapture what was once alive in the period of Orthodoxy. Hence, we should deal with this period in a much more serious way than is usually done in America. In Germany, and generally in European theological faculties—France, Switzerland, Sweden, etc—every student of theology was supposed to learn by heart the doctrines of at least one classical theologian of the post-Reformation period of Orthodoxy, be it Lutheran or Calvinist, and in Latin at that. Even if we should forget about the Latin today, we should know these doctrines, because they form the classical system of Protestant thought. It is an unheard-of state of things when Protestant churches of today do not even know the classical expression of their own foundations in the dogmatics of Orthodoxy. This means that you cannot even understand people like Schleiermacher or Ritschl, American liberalism or the Social Gospel theology, because you do not know that against which they were directed or on what they were dependent. All theology of today is dependent in some way on the classical systems of Orthodoxy.

Orthodox theology also had a political significance, because of the need to define the status of religion in the political atmosphere of the post-Reformation period. It was a period which prepared the Thirty Years' War. Under the German emperor every territory had to define exactly where it stood, and this was the basis of its legal acknowledgment within the unity of the Holy Roman Empire. The theology, furthermore, was a theology of the terri­torial princes. They wanted to know from their theological facul­ties exactly what a minister was supposed to teach. They had to know it because they were the official lords of the church, the highest bishops, summi episcopi. All of the theological problems at this time involved a legal problem. When in regard to the Augsburg Confession you read about the Variata or Invariata, you might think, "What nonsense!" Not only the unity of Protestant­ism was threatened, but also people were killed when the Variata (the Altered Augsburg Confession) was introduced in place of the Invariata (the Unaltered Augsburg Confession) without the per­mission of the princes. It was more than just nonsense. It was the difference between Gnesio-Lutheranism and Philippism. Gnesio-Lutheranism means genuine or original Lutheranism, and was

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represented by Flacius, who was also the greatest church historian of Protestantism. Flacius had a point of view similar to the Barthian school today, stressing the total depravity of man. In scholastic terminology Flacius said that the substance of human nature is original sin. This idea, however, was not accepted by Orthodoxy.

Philippism, on the other side, represented the tendency of Philip Melanchthon. It was very similar to Reformed ideas, so that it is even difficult today to find out how much in Philippism is Reformed and how much is Melanchthonian. This group was nearer to what today we would call a moderate liberal theology, against the Gnesio-Lutherans. The result of these struggles at the end of the sixteenth century was the Formula of Concord (1580). Many of the territorial churches believed that it contained the pure interpretation of the Augsburg Confession in its unaltered form. The implication of all this is that the doctrinal element becomes much more important in Orthodoxy than in the Reform­ation, where the spiritual element was more decisive than the fixed doctrines. Luther did not fix doctrines, although he himself could be very tenacious.

1. Reason and Revelation

We must deal now with the principles of orthodox thought. One of the first was the relationship to philosophy, a very old issue in Protestantism. Luther, it seems, was disinclined to accept anything from reason, but in reality this is not true. It is true that he made many angry statements against the philosophers, by whom he usually had in mind the scholastics and their teacher, Aristotle. But in his famous words at the Diet of Worms Luther himself said that unless he were refuted either by Holy Scripture or by reason, he would not recant. Luther was not an irrationalist. What he fought against was that the categories of reason should transform the substance of faith. Reason is not able to save but must be saved itself.

It became immediately clear that theology cannot be taught without philosophy, that philosophical categories must be used, consciously or unconsciously, in teaching anything whatsoever. For this reason Luther did not prevent Melanchthon from intro­ducing Aristotle again, and with Aristotle many humanistic

The Development of Protestant Theology   279

elements. However, there were always some who attacked philosophy, humanism, and Aristotle. There was a man, Daniel Hoffmann, who said: "The philosophers are the patriarchs of heresy." This is what some theologians say even today. But when they develop their own theologies, you can easily show from which "patriarchs of heresy", that is, from which philosophers, they have taken their categories. They have said: What is philosophically true is theologically wrong; the philosophers are unregenerated insofar as they are philosophers. This is a very interesting statement because it means that there is a realm of life which in itself cannot be regenerated. This contradicts, however, the emphasis on secularism in Protestantism. "Philosophers", said Hoffmann, "try to be like God because they develop a philosophy which is not theologically given." Hoffmann was not able to carry through this idea, but he produced a continual suspicion against the philosophers in the churches and in theology, a much greater suspicion against philosophy than exists in the Roman Church. And this suspicion is very much alive again in the present-day theological situation.

The final victory of philosophy within theology was the pre­supposition of all the theological systems in Orthodoxy. Johann Gerhard was the one who developed the classical system in Lutheran theology. He was a great philosopher and theologian, in some ways comparable to Thomas Aquinas for Roman Catholics. He represents the latest flowering of Protestant schol­asticism. He distinguished articles which are pure from those which are mixed. Those which are solely revealed are pure; those which are rationally possible as well as revealed are mixed. He believed, with Thomas Aquinas, that the existence of God can be proved rationally. But he was also aware that this rational proof does not give us certainty. "Although the proof is correct, we believe it because of revelation." In this way we have two struc­tures: the substructure of reason, and the superstructure of revel­ation. The biblical doctrines form the superstructure. What actually happened later—and this is a preview of the centuries which followed—was that the mixed articles became unmixed rationally, and that the substructure of rational theology dis­possessed the superstructure of revelation, drawing it into itself and taking away its meaning. When this happens, we are in the realm of rationalism or Enlightenment.

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2. The Formal and Material Principles

Protestantism in Orthodoxy developed two principles of theo­logy, a formal and a material principle. So far as I know, however, these are nineteenth-century terms. The formal principle is the Bible; the material principle is the doctrine of justification. They are interdependent, according to Luther. What presents the message of justification in the Bible is that which deals with Christ, and this is what is authentic. On the other hand, this doctrine is taken from the Bible and is, therefore, dependent on it. This interdependence of Bible and justification was maintained in Luther's thought in a free, creative, and living way. The atti­tude of Orthodoxy became different. The two principles were placed beside each other. The result was that the Bible became the real principle in the realm of authority.

What was the doctrine of the Bible in Orthodoxy? The Bible is attested in a threefold way: (1) by external criteria, such as age, miracles, prophecy, martyrs, etc.; (2) by internal criteria, such as style, sublime ideas, moral sanctity; (3) by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. This testimony, however, gets another meaning. No longer does it have the Pauline meaning that we are the children of God ("The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God." Romans 8:16). Instead, it became the testimony that the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures are true and inspired by the Spirit. In place of the immediacy of the Spirit in the relationship of God and man, the Spirit witnesses to the authenticity of the Bible insofar as it is a document of the divine Spirit. The difference is that if the Spirit tells you that you are children of God, this is an immediate experience, and there is no law involved in it at all. But if the Spirit testifies that the Bible contains true doctrines, the whole thing is brought out of the person-to-person relationship into an objective legal relationship. This is exactly what Orthodoxy did.

A very interesting discussion about the theologia irregenitorum followed from this, the theology of those who are not converted, the unregenerated. If the Bible is the law of Protestantism, it should be possible for all who can read the Bible and interpret it objectively to write a systematic theology, even though they do not participate in the Christian faith. All they have to do is to

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understand the meaning of the words and sentences of the Bible. This was absolutely denied by the pietists, who said that there can be only a theologia regenitorum, a theology of those who are regenerated. If we look at this discussion in modern terms, we can say that Orthodoxy believed in the possibility of a systematic theology which is not existential, while the pietists believed that it is necessary for theology to be existential.

There is something difficult in both positions. The unregener-ated man is able to know that what the Church or the Bible says is essential for salvation, but he is unable to apply this to the present situation. The function of the orthodox theologian is in­dependent of his religious quality. He may be completely outside. On the other hand, the pietist theologian can say of himself, and others can say of him, that he is converted, regenerated, and a real Christian. But he has to state this with certainty. Is there anyone who can do this, who can say: "I am a real Christian"? The moment he does it, he ceases to be a real Christian, since he is looking to himself for certainty in his relation to God. This is most certainly impossible. This problem still exists today in all Protes­tant churches. In my Systematic Theology I have solved the problem in the following way. Only he who experiences the Christian message as his ultimate concern is able to be a theo­logian, but nothing more than this can be demanded. It may be that one who is in doubt about every particular doctrine is a better theologian than many others, as long as this doubt about doctrine involves his ultimate concern. So one does not need to be "converted" to be a theologian—whatever that term may mean. You are not asked to test whether or not you are a good Christian, so that you can say: "Now since I am a good Christian, I can be a theologian." The pietist would tell you: "You must first be con­verted before you can really be a theologian.' Then you should answer him: "The only thing which is 'first' is that the ultimate concern coming from God has grasped me, so that I am concerned about him and his message, but I cannot say more than this. And sometimes I am not even able to express it in these terms, because even the term 'God' disappears sometimes. In any case, I cannot use it as the basis for believing that I am a good Christian and thus possibly a theologian."

The orthodox doctrine of inspiration took some of Calvin's ideas and made them more radical and primitive. The authors of Scrip‑

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ture were the hands of Christ, the notaries of the Holy Spirit, the "pens" by which the Spirit wrote the Bible. The words, and even the pointings in the Hebrew text, are inspired. Hence, an ortho­dox theologian, Buxtehof, contested the fact that the consonants of the Hebrew text received their vowel pointings in the seventh to ninth centuries A.D.; instead, they must have originated with the Old Testament itself. The prophets must have invented the sys­tem of pointing, which was actually invented fifteen hundred years later. This is the consequence of a consistent doctrine of inspiration; otherwise, what would the divine Spirit do with the Hebrew text, for without the vowels, the Hebrew words are ambiguous in many places. Then there is the problem with Luther's and the King James' translations, and with other new translations. One is driven to actual absurdities with this doctrine of inspiration. To maintain it one has to make artificial harmoniza-tions, for there are innumerable contradictions in the Bible on historical as well as on other matters. Such contradictions are made out to be only apparent, and one is forced to be ingenious in inventing ways to harmonize them.

Another deeper principle was the analogia scripturae sanctae, the analogy of sacred Scripture, which means that one part must be interpreted in terms of another. By this means creeds could be established on the basis of Holy Scripture. These were the for­mulae which everybody was supposed to find in the Bible. This was another inescapable consequence of the doctrine of inspira­tion.

There was another help for people who had to swallow the doc­trine of verbal inspiration. The question was: What about the many doctrines we find in the Bible? Are they all necessary for salvation? The Catholic Church had a very good answer. You do not need to know any of them; you have only to believe what the church believes. Only the ministers and educated people need to know the special doctrines. The Catholic layman believes what the church believes, without knowing what that is in many respects. Protestantism could not do this. Since personal faith means everything in Protestantism, the distinction between fides implicita and explicita (implicit and explicit faith) is impossible for it. But then an impossible task arose: How can every ordinary farmer, shoemaker, and proletarian in the city and the country understand all these many doctrines found in the Bible, which are

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too numerous even for an educated man to know in his theological examinations? The answer was given by distinguishing between fundamental and non-fundamental articles. Such a distinction is popular even today. In principle this distinction should not be made, because if the divine Spirit reveals something, to what extent can we say it is non-fundamental? In any case, non-fundamentals proved later on to be very fundamental, when certain consequences were drawn from non-fundamental devia­tions.

Although this was a dangerous thing, it had to be done for educational reasons. Most people are just not able to understand all the implications of the doctrines of the church. Two interests were in conflict with each other. On the one hand, the interest of the systematic theologian is to increase the fundamentals as much as possible; everything is important, not only because he is writing about it, but because it is in the Bible. On the other hand, the interest of the educator contradicts this interest of the systematic theologian. The educator wants to maintain as little as possible, so that what he teaches becomes understandable. He would like to leave out all doctrines of secondary importance. In the end the educator prevails. What we find in the rationalism of the Enlight­enment is largely a reduction of the fundamentals to the level of popular reasonableness. Education was partly responsible for the coming of the Enlightenment; it was a central concern of all the great philosophers of that period. Even today the departments of education are usually more inclined toward a theology based on the Enlightenment than the other departments of theology are. The reason for this is that the educational needs bring about a limitation of content, whereas the theological needs call for an enlargement of content.

B. PIETISM

Orthodoxy had one doctrine which was a transition to the next great movement—Pietism. In its doctrine of the ordo salutis, the order of salvation, the last step was the unio mystica, the mystical union with God. For Luther this is the beginning of the faith in justification. The moment that Orthodoxy accepted from the ecclesiastical tradition the unio mystica as a definite state which must be reached, the concept of faith became intellectualized. In Luther both are kept together; in Orthodoxy they fall asunder.

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Faith becomes the intellectual acceptance of true doctrine, and communion with God becomes a matter of mystical experience. This splits Luther's thought—especially of the younger Luther—into two pieces; the mystical and the intellectual aspects are placed beside each other.

What is Pietism? The term is much less respectable in America than in Europe. There the words "pious" and "pietist" can be used of people, but hardly in America, because here they carry the connotations of hypocrisy and moralism. Pietism does not neces­sarily have these connotations. It is the reaction of the subjective side of religion against the objective side. Of course, the subjec­tive side in the order of salvation was dealt with in Orthodoxy, but it did not mean very much. Actually Orthodoxy lived in the objectivity of theological and ecclesiastical organization. Yet, this should not be overemphasized. As the hymns of Paul Gerhardt show—he lived during the highest development of this period—there was always a personal religious relationship to God. But for the masses of people it was the license to become licentious; the state of morality was miserably low, especially in the Lutheran countries, where the doctrinal element was decisive and discipline did not exist.

The pietists, and especially the greatest of them, Philip Jacob Spener, wrote in continual reference to Luther. He showed that all the elements of Pietism were present in the early Luther, and that Orthodoxy had removed them in favor of the objective con­tents of doctrine. Spener tried to show that Orthodoxy had grasped only one side of Luther. Pietism was justified in this respect. Pietism also had a great influence on culture as a whole. It was the first to act in terms of social ethics. The pietists in Halle founded the first orphanage and started the first missionary enterprises. Orthodoxy held that the non-Christian nations are lost, because they had already received the apostolic preaching immediately after the founding of the church, and rejected it. St. Thomas, for instance, had gone to Asia. So it is not necessary to renew the missionary enterprise. The pietists felt altogether differ­ently about it. Human souls, wherever they may be, can be saved through conversion. So they began their missions to foreign lands, and this gave them world-historical perspectives. A man like Zinzendorf, together with Wesley, looked to America, while Orthodoxy restricted itself to its own territorial churches.

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The liturgical realm was also changed a great deal. One of the most important changes was the reintroduction of confirmation as a confirming of the sacrament of baptism.

Pietism is important for theology in three respects. It tried to reform theology, the church, and morals. According to Pietism, theology is a practical discipline. In order to know, one must first believe—an old demand of Christian theology. This demand en­tails, at the same time, the central importance of exegesis. Old and New Testament theology become decisive, not systematic theology. Wherever biblical theology prevails over systematic theology, that is almost always due to the influence of Pietism. Before the theologian is able to edify others, he must first be educated himself.

The church is not only a body of people which exists to listen to the Word. Not only ministers but also laymen are the bearers of the church. Laymen are to have an active part in the priestly function in different places—sometimes in the church, but mostly in their homes, and in special conventicles of piety, collegia pietatis, where they came together to cultivate piety. They spent hours in the interpretation of the Bible, and they emphasized the need for conversion. They emphasized the idea of an ecciesiola in ecciesia, a small church within the large church.

Pietism also influenced the morals in the Protestant world. At the end of the seventeenth century the moral situation was disastrous in Europe. The Thirty Years' War brought about dissolution and chaos. The form of life became extremely brutal, un­refined, and uneducated. The orthodox theologians did not do much about it. The pietists, however, tried to gather individual Christians who would accept the burden and the liberation of the Christian life. Its main idea was sanctification, a common em­phasis in Christian sectarian movements. Individual sanctification includes, first of all, a negation of the love of the world. The question of the ethical adiaphora became important in the dis­cussion with orthodox theology. (Adiaphoron means that which makes no difference, having no ethical relevance.) The question was whether there are some human actions of no ethical rele­vance, which can be done or left undone with equal right. Ortho­doxy said there is a whole realm of such adiaphora; Pietism denied it, calling it love of the world. As it often happens with such things, Spener was mild in his condemnation, then Francke

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and the Halle pietists became very radical. They fought against dancing, the theater, games, beautiful dresses, banquets, shallow talk in daily life, and in general resembled the Puritan attitude. In this connection, however, I would like to say that it was not so much the Puritans who produced this system of vital repression so common in America; it was more the pietistic evangelical move­ments of the mid-nineteenth century which were responsible for this condemnation of smoking, drinking, movies, etc.

The orthodox theologians strongly reacted against the attack of the pietists. One of them wrote a book with the title Malum Pietisticum, "The Pietistic Evil". They fought against each other on many points, but in the end the pietistic movement was superior because it was allied with the trends of the time, away from the strict objectivism and authoritarianism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the principles of autonomy which appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is entirely wrong to place the rationalism of the Enlightenment in contradiction to pietistic mysticism. It is popular nonsense that reason and mysticism are the two great opposites. His­torically, Pietism and the Enlightenment both fought against Orthodoxy. The subjectivity of Pietism, or the doctrine of the "inner light" in Quakerism and other ecstatic movements, has the character of immediacy or autonomy against the authority of the church. To put it more sharply, modern rational autonomy is a child of the mystical autonomy of the doctrine of the inner light. The doctrine of the inner light is very old; we have it in the Franciscan theology of the Middle Ages, in some of the radical sects (especially the later Franciscans), in many sects of the Refor­mation period, in the transition from spiritualism to rationalism, from the belief in the Spirit as the autonomous guide of every individual to the rational guidance which everybody has by his autonomous reason. From another historical perspective, the third stage of Joachim of Floris, the stage of the Holy Spirit, is behind the idea among the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment that they have reached the third stage, the age of reason, in which every individual is taught directly. They go back to the prophecy of Joel, in which every maid or servant is taught directly by the Holy Spirit, and no one is dependent on anybody else for the Spirit.

Thus we can say that rationalism is not opposed to mysticism,

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if by mysticism we mean the presence of the Spirit in the depths of the human soul. Rationalism is the child of mysticism, and both of them are opposed to authoritarian Orthodoxy.

C. THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Socinianism is one of the sources of the Enlightenment. It was a movement started by Faustus Socinus, who fled from Italy to Poland where he found a haven of security against the Counter-Reformation and the persecutions of some of the Reformation churches. He and his followers wrote the book called Racovian Catechism, which presents a predominantly rationalistic Protes­tant theology. Harnack says in his history of Dogma that Socinian-ism was the end of the history of Christian dogma. Protestantism had preserved some dogmas, at least the early dogmas of the church. Socinianism dissolved all the Christian dogmas with the help of the rationalism and humanism of the Renaissance. This movement is more important than either the repetition of it in English deism, where it was radicalized, or in modern liberal theology, including Harnack himself, where it was carried through.

(1)The Socinians accepted the authority of the Bible, but de­clared that in non-essential things it may be in error. i'urtherrnore, historical criticism is necessary. Its criterion is that nothing can be a revelation of God in the Bible that is against reason and common sense. And nothing that is morally useless can be the revelation of God in the Bible. Socinus spoke of religio rationalis, rational religion, which is given in the Bible and is the criterion for the authority of the Bible.

(2)In the doctrine of Cod Socinus criticized mainly the dogma of the trinity. The Socinians are the predecessors of the later Unitarian movements. He said—and in this he is historically right —that the arguments for the trinitarian dogma do not exist in the Bible as they were later presented in Orthodoxy. The Bible does not contain the dogma of the trinity, although there are some trinitarian formulations. The Greek concepts, he said, anticipating the Ritschlian criticism of the dogma on which we are all depen­dent today, are inadequate for understanding the meaning of the gospel and are, moreover, contradictory in themselves.

(3)God created the world out of the given chaos (tohu wabohu

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in the creation story in Genesis) which the pagan religions and also Greek philosophy presuppose. Man is the image of God be­cause of his reason, which makes him superior to the animals. Adam was not a perfect man, but was primitive and by nature mortal. He had neither original immortality nor original perfec­tion. J believe this is closer to the biblical text in both respects than the later glorification of Adam which makes his fall abso­lutely impossible to understand. The Socinians derive the fall of Adam from the strength of his sensual impressions and on the basis of his freedom. This freedom is still in man.

(4)Hence, the idea of original or hereditary sin is a contradic­tory concept. Socinus says that there is no sin without guilt. If we are guilty by birth, then we must have sinned before we were born, or at least at the very beginning of our life, which is a meaningless statement. What is really the truth is that we are historically depraved and that our freedom is weakened. This makes it necessary for God to give us a new revelation beyond natural revelation. Christ has a true human nature, but not a divine nature. On the other hand, he is not just an ordinary man. He is a higher type of man, a "superman", so to speak, in the Nietzschean, not the comic-book, sense. For this reason he can be an object of adoration.

(5)The priestly office of Christ is denied. He is prophet and king. The ideas about a substitutionary sacrifice or punishment or satisfaction for sin are meaningless and self-contradictory, be­cause guilt is always a personal thing and must be attributed to individuals. On the other hand, Christ is king and sits at the right hand of God and is really ruling and judging.

(6)Justification is dissolved into a moralistic terminology. In order to be justified, we must keep the commandments. With respect to the state, he favored passive resistance against the power forms of the state.

(7)Eschatology is dissolved; it is a fantastic myth. What remains and is most important is immortality. This must be pre­served by all means.

Many of these ideas anticipate the theology of the Enlighten­ment and modern liberalism. What really survives from Socinianism are the three theological ideas of the Enlightenment: God, freedom, and immortality. I like to quote from Immanuel Kant's What is Enlightenment?: "Enlightenment is man's release

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from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'—that is the motto of enlightenment." Kant goes on to show how much more comfortable it is to have guardians and authorities but he says this comfort has to be given up. Man must stand upon himself; it is his nature to be autonomous.

Rationalism and Enlightenment emphasize human autonomy. "Autonomy" is not used in the sense of arbitrariness, of man making himself or deciding about himself in terms, of his indi­vidual desires and arbitrary willfulness. Autonomy is derived from autos and nomos (self-law) in Greek. It does not say that "I am a law unto myself", but that the universal law of reason, which is the structure of reality, is within me. This concept of autonomy is often falsified by theologians who say this is the misery of man, that he wants to be autonomous rather than dependent on God. This is poor theology and poor philosophy. Autonomy is the natural law given by God, present in the human mind and in the structure of the world. Natural law usually means in classical philosophy and theology the law of reason, and this is the divine law. Autonomy is following this law as we find it in ourselves. It is always connected with a strong obedience to the law of reason, stronger than any religious idea that seems to be arbitrary. The adherents of autonomy in the Enlightenment were opposed to anything so arbitrary as divine grace. They wanted to emphasize man's obedience to the law of his own nature and the nature of the world.

The opposite of autonomy is the concept of heteronomy. Hetero-nomy is precisely arbitrariness. Arbitrariness shows up as soon as fear or desire determine our actions, whether this fear be pro­duced by God or society or our own weakness. For Kant the authoritarian attitude of the churches, or even of God if he is seen in a heteronomous light, is arbitrariness. Arbitrariness is subjection to authority, if this authority is not confirmed by reason itself, for otherwise one is subjecting oneself on the basis of fear, anxiety, or desire. The Enlightenment is the attempt to build a world on this autonomous reason.

Just as autonomy is not willfulness, reason is not calculation.

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Reason is the awareness of the principles of truth and justice. In the name of this reason, the Enlightenment fought against the demonic authorities of the ancien régime in eighteenth-century France and in Europe generally. This reason is the awareness of the principles of truth and goodness, not the calculating and con­trolling reason of business. The eighteenth century had some heroic elements in it; reason is always seen fighting against the distortions of humanity under the regime of the French kings and the Roman popes and all who cooperated with them for the sup­pression of humanity. We should not have contempt for the rationalism of the eighteenth century, if we know what it did for us. It is due to the Enlightenment that we have no more witch trials. It was Cartesian philosophy applied to concrete problems which made such a superstition impossible. The general educa­tion we all enjoy in the West is a creation of the eighteenth century. And our democratic ideology had its origin in the same century.

Harmony is a third principle of the Enlightenment, following from the principles of autonomy and reason. If we find the prin­ciples of truth and justice in the depths of our being, and if each individual has different interests, how are a common knowledge and common symbols of democracy and economy possible? If autono­mous reason in each individual is the ultimate arbiter, is not that the end of a coherent society? The principle of harmony is the answer to this question. This principle does not mean that there is nice harmony between everyone. The eighteenth century knew how terrible life really was. Rather, harmony means that if every­one follows his rational, or even irrational tendencies, there is nevertheless a law behind the backs of everyone which has the effect of making everything come out most adequately. This is the meaning of the Manchester school of economics, the meaning of the pursuit of happiness in the American Constitution and of belief in democracy. In spite of the fact that each one decides for himself about the government, a common will, a volonté genérale, will somehow result from all of this. This is the belief in ethics and education, that a community spirit will be the result of everyone's becoming educated as a personality. This is the principle of Protestantism, that if every individual in his own way encounters the biblical message, a conformism of Protestant character will be the outcome.

The miracle is that this happened, that actually the prophecy

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under the principle of harmony was really verified in all these realms. The greatest development in economy happened. A Protestant conformism arose, in spite of the numerous denomina­tions. And democracy has worked and is still working, in spite of the disruptive tendencies that are visible today in America. The modern belief in progress is rooted in this principle of harmony, in spite of any lack of authority.

Tolerance is another concept we must keep in mind when deal­ing with the Enlightenment. One of the main historical reasons for tolerance is that if intolerance had continued, all Europe would have been destroyed by the religious wars. It could be saved only by a tolerant state which is indifferent toward the various confes­sional groups fighting against each other. However, when John Locke wrote his letters on tolerance, he was well aware that toler­ance can never be an absolute principle. So he limited it in an interesting way. Although a leader of the development toward the Enlightenment, he nevertheless said that there are two groups which cannot be tolerated. They are the Catholics and the atheists. Catholics cannot be tolerated because they are by definition intolerant; they aim to subjugate every nation they can by force to the authority of the Roman Church. Atheists are not intolerant, but they threaten the very foundation of Western society, which is based on the idea of Cod. The greatest witness to John Locke's point is Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that because "God is dead", the transformation of the whole society is at hand. This is what John Locke wanted to preclude in the name of reason.

English Deism is another movement of great importance for modern theology. The deists used philosophy in a practical way to solve theological problems. Deism was a movement of the intelligentsia, and not so much a real philosophy. They wrote attacks against traditional Orthodoxy. They criticized, as the Socinians had done, the problems of biblical religion. All elements of criticism can be found in them which we now associate with liberal theology. The problems of biblical history, the authority of Jesus, the problem of miracles, the question of special revelation, the history of religion, which shows that Christianity is not some­thing so different, the category of myth, which was invented by the deists two hundred and fifty years before Buitmanu's essay on demythologization—these are the problems with which Conti­nental theology has had to deal ever since. The great movement

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of historical criticism began around 1750. Lessing, who was the greatest personality of the Enlightenment, a poet and a philosopher, was the leader in the fight against a stupid Orthodoxy which stuck to the traditional terms. The great critical line of develop­ment in theology, running from D. F. Strauss, Schleiermacher, etc. to Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer, and Bultmann, had its origin back there in the middle of the eighteenth century, which itself was carrying through the ideas of the Socinians and others.

It may seem as if there were one all-embracing development in theology, an ocean which flooded over the continents. But this is not true. There were reactions in all these periods. There were high and low tides. There were the reactions of Methodism and Pietism; there was the reaction of Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century; there were the revivalistic movements in the mid-nineteenth century, and finally there is the reaction of Neo-Orthodoxy at the beginning of the twentieth century. in all of these movements, one question is predominant: What about the compatibility of the modem mind with the Christian message? There was always an oscillation between an attempt at synthesis, in the Hegelian and Platonic sense, which means a creative unity of different elements of reality. In this sense the two men with the greatest theological influence in the nineteenth century were Hegel and Schleiermacher. Together they produced what I can the great synthesis. They took into themselves all the impulses of the modern mind, all the results of the autonomous development. Beyond this they tried to show that the true Christian message can be maintained only on this basis, and not in terms of either Orthodoxy or the Enlightenment. They rejected both and tried to find a way beyond them, Schleiermacher more from the mysti­cal tradition of his pietistic background (he was a Moravian), and Hegel more in philosophical terms out of the Neo-Platonic tradi­tion. By 1840 both of these forms of synthesis were considered to have broken down completely, and an extreme naturalism and materialism developed. At this time, then, another theological school tried to save what it could. This was the Ritschlian school, the leaders of which, beside Ritschl himself, were Wilhelm Herr­mann and Adolph von Harnack, who is the teacher of all of us in many respects. This was a new synthesis on a more modest level, on the level of Kant's division of the world of knowledge from the world of values.

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The Ritschlian synthesis broke down at the turn of the century, partly under the impact of inner theological developments. Here I can mention Ernst Troeltsch, my great teacher, and Martin Kähler, my other great teacher, who came from the pietistic and revivalistic tradition of Halle. Primarily, however, it broke down from the impact of the events of world history, the World Wars, which spelled the end of centuries of European life. Again the diastasis against the synthesis of Christianity and the modern mind became real under Karl Barth. My own answer is that syn­thesis can never be avoided, because man is always man, and at the same time under God. He can never be under God in such a way that he ceases to be human. In order to find a new way beyond the former ways of synthesis, I use the method of correlation. I try to show that the Christian message is the answer to all the problems involved in self-criticizing humanism; today we call this existentialism; it is a self-analyzing humanism. This is neither synthesis nor diastasis, neither identification nor separation; it is correlation. And I believe the whole story of Christian thought points in this direction.