What Every Beginning Student Needs to Know About Nineteenth-Century Protestant Theology
Paul E. Capetz*
United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
Previously published in Religion Compass 2/6 (2008): 961-978, 10.11114.1749-8171.2008.00107.x
The nineteenth century was as important for the reforming of Christian doctrine as the sixteenth century had been. In conjunction with their respective revisions of doctrine, both centuries witnessed a corresponding development of new models of Christian theology’s task in terms of its sources, norms, and methods. In each of them, the radical recasting of doctrine and the consequent reconception of theology as a discipline came about in response to new religious and intellectual challenges then posed to the received Christian tradition. These epochs, moreover, gave powerful expression to the Protestant spirit within Christianity: whereas the sixteenth century formulated the classical Protestant alternative to Roman Catholic doctrine and its standard mode of theological justification, the nineteenth century proposed a new understanding of the Reformation heritage of Luther and Calvin that has come to be known as liberal Protestantism.
Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century stood the Enlightenment that, beginning in earnest around the middle of the seventeenth century and coming to full bloom in the eighteenth, set forth the characteristic features of the modern understanding of reality. For our purposes, modernity is distinguished from medievalism in two main respects: first, the emancipation of philosophy from its subservient role as theology’s `handmaid’ and, second, the empirical method of natural science. Together these two developments signify a new morality of knowledge in which appeals to authority are no longer sufficient to validate claims to truth. In philosophy, the Enlightenment’s decisive break with the Middle Ages was epitomized by the methodical doubt of Descartes and in science by Bacon’s reflections upon the necessity of induction based on observation of the natural world unencumbered by ancient and medieval metaphysical assumptions about reality. In theology, the Enlightenment posed a challenge to both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism with their mutually exclusive claims to have the correct interpretation of the supernatural revelation upon which true religion was to be based.
While this article will proceed chronologically through major Protestant thinkers of the nineteenth century, it will be helpful to keep in mind the major questions and issues faced by these thinkers, which can be summarized in the following manner. First and foremost, modern science posed a huge challenge to the medieval worldview that had been taken for granted as an indispensable concomitant of Christian faith. The most creative minds in our story opposed this assumption and attempted to find ways to affirm Christian faith within the context of a thoroughly modern intellectual framework. Second, this effort led to three new possibilities for thinking about God and God’s relation to the world: deism, pantheism, and panentheism. Third, the phenomenon of `religion’, as distinct from Christian religion, came in for critical scrutiny and various attempts were made to define it anew, whether as a postulate of the moral life (Kant), as a feeling of absolute dependence (Schleierrnacher), or as philosophical knowledge of God (Hegel). Fourth, the exploration of explicitly non-theological interpretations of religion became a real option and developed into the humanistic and social-scientific study of religion. Fifth, some of these interpretations of religion were decidedly anti-theological in their basic thrust, though this did not altogether prevent theologians from attempting to appropriate their crucial critical insights in piecemeal fashion. Sixth, the nineteenth century in theology was the age of historical consciousness in which the Bible and the tradition of the church were subjected to detailed critical scrutiny by scholars employing methods generally accepted by modern historians. As a result, this sort of study led to the recognition that the Bible is not a book of reliable historical fact. While there are genuine historical reminiscences preserved in it, the Bible often employs myth to communicate its basic religious insights. Furthermore, it was seen how much of its content reflects values and assumptions widely shared by ancient people. For theologians who fully accepted the results of this historical-critical scholarship, it was no longer possible to view the Bible as a supernaturally inspired document fundamentally different from all other examples of ancient religious literature. Why, then, and in what way the Bible should continue to function as a unique authority for religious instruction in the church remain questions for which there are as yet no agreed-upon answers among theologians.
The rise of science posed one of the major challenges to Christian thought in the modern world. Modern science, as typified by Newton’s formulation of the law of gravity, depicted nature as a closed network of cause and effect that brooks no interference from without.
One theological response was `Deism’ (from the Latin dens meaning `God’). It was the quintessential manifestation of the Enlightenment’s new approach to knowledge in matters of religion and theology. It presented itself as having retrieved the `natural religion’ of humanity before its corruption by superstitious clerics. Deists held to a belief in God as the world’s artificer who, like a good watchmaker, designed the world machine to run according to the laws of its own internal momentum. This view of God’s external and detached relation to the world does not require any periodic divine interruption of the natural laws of cause and effect that modern people had come to equate with the idea of a `miracle’. Hence, deism’s strength as a theological position lay in its compatibility with the lessons of science as to how nature works. Deists held, moreover, that God had implanted the moral law within the human conscience so that right and wrong can be known through its natural light and thus need not first be learned through study of sacred scriptures. Reward for virtue and punishment for vice await human beings in the afterlife, when the scales of good and evil will be balanced. Since its creedal affirmations were not based on revealed truth as in ecclesiastical theology, deism’s proponents expounded what is known as `natural theology’ whereby genuine knowledge of God can only be validated by the common assent of all rational persons to the deliverances of experience. Ideally, then, a modern theology, in the strict sense, is one that argues for the existence and character of God solely on the basis of reason and common human experience. Yet, a large part of the challenge for nineteenth-century theologians derived from the critique of deistic natural theology made by more thoroughgoing proponents of the Enlightenment ideal for philosophy and science, such as Hume and Kant.
Hume subjected the natural theology of the deists to critical scrutiny and found it wanting. Their argument for an intelligent designer of the world, he pointed out, claims to prove more that is warranted by the evidence, because our experience of the world’s imperfections might just as well lead us to suspect that the world is the product of an incompetent deity. The most one can reasonably assert, according to Hume, is that the world must have had some cause or other, but the attribution of wisdom, benevolence, and omnipotence to this cause is illicit. Hume thereby demonstrated that deist theology was in fact a secularized version of Christian theism, but without the latter’s assumption of a divine revelation in the Bible as the indispensable epistemological platform from which these attributes may be predicated of God with assurance. Hume’s philosophical critique thus effectively excluded natural theology, at least in the form given to it by the deists, as a viable basis of religious affirmations for most nineteenth-century theologians, just as the later triumph of Darwin’s evolutionary theory had the effect of eradicating the idea of design or purpose in nature from post-Darwinian scientific thought.
Kant gave credit to Hume for stimulating him to chart a new path in philosophy that would secure the epistemological foundations of modern science by clarifying the relation between rational and empirical elements in knowledge. Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy, as it has been called, consisted in its turn toward the human subject as knower and in the critical investigation of the limits of human reason itself. As a result, Kant argued that metaphysical ideas (God, freedom, and immortality) are not objects of knowledge in the proper sense of the term, because there is nothing in our sense experience, which is an essential component in all scientific understanding, to which these ideas correspond. This does not mean, however, that such ideas are ridiculous, as Hume presumably thought. Kant’s importance for modern theology consists in his transposition of belief in God as the world’s designer and moral lawgiver onto a new foundation not vulnerable to Hume’s criticisms. He did this by speaking of God as a `postulate of the practical reason’, which is a necessary assumption about reality that must be presupposed if the moral life is to be sustained as meaningful. As the reward for virtue in this life is often misery and, conversely, many wicked people enjoy happiness beyond their just deserts, it is obvious that the world is not fair in any empirically observable sense. Therefore, the pursuit of morality would be meaningless apart from our expectation that these injustices will be redressed by God in the afterlife. Whereas, for Kant, theoretical (scientific) reason cannot prove the existence of God as the deists had falsely imagined, practical (moral) reason must of necessity postulate such belief as well as a belief in freedom and immortality. By salvaging the content of the deist creed after Hume’s demolition of its foundation in natural theology, Kant opened the way for religious affirmations to be justified as essential supports of the moral life. As a result of this new avenue of approach to questions of theology, Kant’s moral philosophy of religion came to exercise enormous influence upon some liberal Protestant theologians in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially Albrecht Ritschl and his followers William Herrmann and Adolf von Harnack. Indeed, Kant’s influence upon modern Protestantism has been likened to that of Plato upon the patristic period and of Aristotle upon the Middle Ages.
Kant’s great importance notwithstanding, the pivotal figure whose achievement decisively ushered in the new epoch of nineteenth-century theology was Schleiermacher. Having been reared among pietists, Schleiermacher was influenced early on by their conviction that faith is not primarily a matter of giving intellectual assent to doctrines but is, rather, a heart-felt relation to Christ as the redeemer. Pietism had emerged in the seventeenth century as a reaction to what was perceived to be the arid intellectualism of the established churches of the Reformation, Lutheran, and Reformed (Calvinist), with their one-sided emphasis upon the overriding importance of adhering to correct doctrinal formulae. The pietists’ countervailing emphasis upon a religion of the heart did not, however, imply any indifference on their part to questions of doctrine nor did it mean that they had rejected the doctrinal edifice of Protestant orthodoxy. So the young Schleiermacher, upon first encountering the critical impulses stemming from the Enlightenment, experienced a deep crisis of faith when he could not reconcile the new scientific understanding of reality with the doctrinal heritage of the Reformation. Although he initially assumed that he had lost his faith altogether, he later came to realize that what he had lost was merely his original boyhood understanding of it. With this distinction between faith, which is a matter of the heart, and theology, which reflects the mind’s effort to understand the religious affections of a pious heart, Schleiermacher was thereby freed to seek a more sophisticated interpretation of the experience of conversion that had left its indelible imprint upon his soul. Indeed, the erstwhile pietist would make it the keystone of his distinctive approach to theology that doctrines per se are never the objects of faith, but are properly to be appreciated as `accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech’ (Schleiermacher 2001, § 15, p. 76). This particular view of the relation between faith and doctrine entailed a revised understanding of the dogmatic (or systematic) task of theology as the quest to discern how all the various doctrinal loci (or topics) are coherently interrelated as intellectual expressions of the Christian’s faith in Christ who, by redeeming us from sin, enables us to partake of a new and more potent awareness of God. Looking back upon the subsequent course of his life, the mature Schleiermacher confessed that he had truly become a pietist again, though `of a higher order’.
Schleiermacher broke new ground by reworking the experiential and affective emphasis of pietism into a general theory of human (and not merely Christian) religion that allowed for a third alternative to both the supernaturalism of Protestant orthodoxy and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, including its theological expression in deism. The immediate occasion for the development of Schleiermacher’s new proposal for understanding religion is to be sought in his intimate acquaintance with the leading literary figures in the movement of German Romanticism. He shared their critique of the intellectualism of the Enlightenment as well as their aspiration to appreciate and, indeed, to cultivate the non-rational dimensions of human experience that fall outside the purview of a narrowly rationalistic approach to reality. Ironically, these proponents of humanistic culture (Bildung) shared the same disdain for the `positive’ or historically given manifestations of religion as did the Enlightenment thinkers of whom they were otherwise so critical. As an ordained minister in the Reformed church, Schleiermacher sought to show his educated friends the contradiction between their call for the complete cultivation of everything distinctive and individual in human life, on the one hand, and their rejection of the historic religious communities, on the other hand. In his famous Speeches on Religion of 1799, addressed to `the cultured among the despisers of religion’, he defended his conviction that religion, correctly understood, is neither a knowing nor a doing but feeling. To use the language familiar from Kant, religion is not a set of metaphysical doctrines that has its domain in theoretical reason. But unlike Kant, religion is not tied to moral activity either and religious beliefs should thus not be viewed as postulates of practical reason. The emphasis on feeling hearkened back to his pietist roots, but it also evoked the Romantic language about the depths of life that could only be felt, not thought. While it is easy to misconstrue Schleiermacher’s identification of feeling as religion’s proper location on the map of the human spirit as a reduction of religion to a matter of mere emotions, that was certainly not his intent. Still, this has remained a major criticism of his theory of religion, and even those sympathetic to Schleier-macher’s intent, such as Paul Tillich, have questioned whether `feeling’ was really the best choice of words for describing what he meant to say in his attempt to distinguish religion from both knowledge and action. Feeling, in his usage, here refers to an awareness of ourselves as finite and, hence, of our union with everything else qua finite before the separation of self and world appears in our everyday consciousness. Ingredient in this awareness of our common finitude is `a sensibility and taste for the Infinite’, which is Schleiermacher’s first effort at defining the essence of religion (Schleiermacher 1996, p. 23).
To be sure, the language used by Schleiermacher to describe religion’s essential nature was unusual and even startling for one who was a member of the ministerial profession. (Even his Romantic friends had never heard it described in these terms!) Yet, his depiction of it not only differed from orthodox theology, but also signified a break with the reigning Enlightenment alternatives to the church’s theology, such as deism and its Kantian reformulation. Not only was there no reference to theological doctrines as constitutive of religion’s content, but also missing was the assumption that religion is necessary as a support for the moral life. By means of this daring move, Schleiermacher was able to uncover a common, though hitherto unacknowledged assumption uniting the otherwise mutually opposed orthodox theologians of the church and their Enlightenment critics. For both, religion was basically a matter of holding certain beliefs about God to be true and then living in accord with the moral consequences of those beliefs.
These departures from any previous understanding of the essence of religion raised the suspicion in the minds of some critics that Schleiermacher was a pantheist in the mold of Spinoza. After all, in his discourses about religion he had written of `the Infinite’ where one would have expected to read about God. Spinoza was a seventeenth-century Jew who had been excommunicated from his synagogue in Amsterdam for refusing to ascribe personality to God. Instead of imagining God as the transcendent designer of the world who imposed order on it from without, Spinoza thought of God as the principle of order immanent within the world. In the popular mind, pantheism (from the Greek pan meaning `all’) is taken to be a simple, undifferentiated identification of God with nature, on account of the phrase deus sive natura (God or nature) appearing in Spinoza’s writings. However, this characterization of it hardly begins to do justice to the subtlety of his meaning. Spinoza actually distinguished two senses of the word `nature’: natura naturans (nature naturing) and natura naturata (nature natured). Accordingly, God can be equated with nature only in its former sense, which refers to nature’s infinite creative activity in bringing all things into being, whereas nature in the latter sense refers to what we ordinarily understand by the world as the sum of all things brought forth by nature, past or present. Once this distinction is grasped, it can be seen just how similar it is to that made within monotheism whereby the creator and the creation are distinguished from one another. In and of itself, therefore, Spinoza’s reconception of the divine activity as being internal rather than external to the world may not have been perceived to constitute such a decisive break with the tradition of Judeo-Christian theism, were it not also for his rejection of personal imagery for the divine. From the Bible onward, God was imagined to be a person with intelligence and will who acts in accord with intentions. At the time Schleiermacher first issued the Speeches, these heretical ideas of Spinoza had undergone a revival of interest among German thinkers who, though having rejected the supernatural deity of orthodoxy, remained dissatisfied with the extra-mundane artificer of the world propounded by deism. Yet, others recoiled from the Spinozistic doctrine that to them was nothing but a thinly veiled atheism. In this highly charged atmosphere, it would have been most surprising had Schleiermacher’s avant-garde views not been swept up into the so-called `pantheism controversy’.
Before addressing the question whether Schleiermacher was a pantheist, it has to be clarified that the radical character of Schleiermacher’s reinterpretation of religion had actually nothing to do with anything he did or did not say about God. Rather, the novelty of his approach consisted in the fact that he did not consider it necessary to talk about God at all when discussing the nature of religion. In our own time, we take it for granted that, in addition to theology; there is an academic field called `religious studies’ (Religionswissenschaft in German) wherein religion, in all its various historic and contemporary manifestations, is examined solely as a human phenomenon apart from explicit theological commitments that would serve as normative criteria for evaluating the religions. This field of study actually consists of numerous interrelated disciplines, such as the philosophy of religion, the history of religion, and the various social-scientific approaches to the study of religion, such as the anthropology, sociology, and psychology of religion. Each of these disciplines studies religious phenomena from its own distinct angle of vision using the methods generally accepted by practitioners of that discipline. The emergence of a non-theological study of religion came to fruition by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, incited in part by Schleiermacher’s earlier efforts at the turn of the century to treat religion as rooted in and expressive of human consciousness simply as such. Just as modern philosophy broke free of medieval philosophy’s servitude to theology, so too the modern study of religion is autonomous with respect to any claims theologians want to make regarding true and false religion. Therefore, what Schleiermacher qua theologian had to say about God, including the question of his alleged pantheism, is completely irrelevant to the evaluation of his interpretation of religion as a human phenomenon. In this regard, the only valid consideration is whether Schleiermacher qua humanistic scholar of religion has provided us with an impartial and illuminating account of religion on its own terms. While most theologians who have criticized Schleiermacher in this regard, such as Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, have charged that his understanding of religion cannot be reconciled with authentic Christian faith and thus is pernicious from a theological point of view, the practitioner of religious studies might well suspect that the material content of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion, however novel its formulation, in fact bears the marks of its origins in Christian faith. Whereas his fellow theologians may reject Schleiermacher’s theory of religion as deficiently Christian, non-theological scholars of religion may decide that it is too Christian to serve as a general concept encompassing the entire range of human religiosity These twin questions regarding the value of Schleiermacher’s innovations for theology and religious studies continue to remain lively topics of discussion in contemporary scholarship.
When inquiring into the doctrine of God in Schleiermacher’s theology and its relation to his understanding of religion, it is best to proceed from his statements in the `Introduction’ to his mature theological work, The Christian Faith. Unlike the Speeches wherein Schleiermacher had described religion’s essential nature as a sensibility and taste for the Infinite, now he spoke of piety’s essence as `the feeling of absolute dependence, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God’ (Schleiermacher 2001, § 4, p. 12). His conceptual elucidation of this relation suffices to explain why Schleiermacher cannot be classified as a pantheist in the crass sense whereby the world as a whole is taken to be the object of religious feeling. In the self’s consciousness of itself, there is a feeling both of relative freedom and of relative dependence: we are aware of acting so as to influence others and of being acted upon by them in turn. In these reciprocal relations, however, our dependence and our freedom are not absolute. Our dependence upon others in the world or even upon the world as a whole is always qualified by their dependence as the recipients of the effects of our action, even when our actual influence may be quite minute. Conversely, our freedom is ever qualified by the realization that, not having brought ourselves into being, we find ourselves already posited in the world apart from our own choosing, just as we discover ourselves endowed with capacities for action we did not create. Although no feeling of absolute freedom can be found within self-consciousness, there is nonetheless a feeling of absolute dependence accompanying our fluctuating feelings of relative freedom and relative dependence that consists in `the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside of us’ (Schleiermacher 2001, 4.3, p. 16). We thus become conscious of God as the `Whence’ of our feeling of absolute dependence; accordingly, to feel absolutely dependent and to be conscious of God are one and the same. The term `absolute’ indicates that, in relation to God, there is no reciprocity but only receptivity on our part. Language about God arises from this basic datum of our immediate self-consciousness: God is the infinite source of finite being upon which we and everything else with which we stand in relations of reciprocity are dependent without qualification.
The understanding of God and the world here set forth allows for theology to take full account of scientific interpretations of natural causality. Since our consciousness of absolute dependence upon God becomes fully developed only in conjunction with our awareness of the reciprocal relations characterizing the system of nature, Schleiermacher maintained that God’s absolute causality negates neither the relative freedom nor the relative dependence of finite agents: `It can never be necessary in the interest of religion so to interpret a fact that its dependence on God absolutely excludes its being conditioned by the system of nature’ (Schleiermacher 2001, § 47, p. 178). Therefore, to pit God’s omnipotence against the interdependence of nature is a mistake, he argued. If the course of nature is divinely ordained, how can God’s power be augmented by allowing for alterations in what was originally decreed? Such an alteration could only be favorably construed if the original design had been flawed, but that would imply either an imperfection in God or perhaps the existence of some power capable of resisting God. In any case, this would destroy our fundamental feeling of absolute dependence upon the divine causality. Consequently, the most adequate representation of divine omnipotence must reject a view of miracle as a divine interruption into the course of natural causality. Divine causality is to be distinguished from natural causality yet equated with it in scope. Schleiermacher believed that any conflict between science and religion was based on a fundamental misapprehension of the God—world relation and he called for an `eternal covenant’ between free scientific inquiry and Christian faith in which each is autonomous in its respective domain. This line of argument further illumines Schleiermacher’s position on pantheism: if pantheism means that no distinction between God and the world is drawn at all, it is obviously inadequate; but provided the crucial distinction is made, then pantheism’s insistence that God and the world belong together in the religious consciousness is not at all incompatible with monotheism. There are also, Schleiermacher noted, precedents in the classical theological tradition for ascribing personal predicates to God only with extreme care given the radical difference between God and creatures. At any rate, the ideal of piety is that every moment wherein we are conscious of being in the world should be brought into harmonious relation with our simultaneous awareness of the world’s absolute dependence upon the divine causality. In contrast to the metaphysical speculations of philosophy, in the religious consciousness it is not possible to have God apart from the world.
While all finite entities are absolutely dependent upon God, only human beings become conscious of it. For that reason, Schleiermacher spoke of the feeling of absolute dependence and the awareness of God implicit therein as an `original revelation’ of God to the human being. `Original’ is not meant in any historical sense. Schleiermacher did not think monotheism had been the earliest religion of humanity, as orthodox theologians and deists alike assumed. Hume had also raised this issue in his polemic against the deist claim to have retrieved the `natural religion’ of humanity. Polytheism, countered Hume, was much more ancient than monotheism. The subsequent modern study of religion’s history has confirmed Hume’s view. There was no pristine past when religion was pure before its corruption by wicked priests. Here too the deists’ portrayal of primitive religion’s fall into superstition betrayed its unacknowledged reliance on the tradition of the church to which they intended to provide a purely rational alternative. For Schleiermacher, monotheism required for its decisive emergence a fully realized consciousness of the world, so that the feeling of absolute dependence is referred neither to a single power within the world (as in fetishism or idol worship) nor to the totality of interrelated powers (as in polytheism). Instead of regarding monotheism as humanity’s earliest religion, he located it on the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder of human religiosity: In this scheme, Christianity shares the honor of standing at the pinnacle of religious development alongside Judaism and Islam, though in his judgment these other two monotheistic religions have retained vestiges of the earlier stages of fetishism and polytheism, thereby leaving only Christianity as the purest expression of monotheism yet to appear in history. While it is natural enough that we should look back with skepticism and even suspicion upon Schleiermacher’s evolutionary model of religious development as betraying both a Christian and a Western bias, it is still important that we understand the pivotal role his ideas played in effecting a fundamental shift from the rationalistic and ahistorical paradigm characteristic of Enlightenment thought about religion to the full-blown historical consciousness of the nineteenth century in which the individual religions and their histories became the major focus of detailed scholarly attention.
Schleiermacher’s efforts at redefining the nature of religion stood in the service of cultivating a new appreciation of the religious communities that have appeared in history. Each of them is a unique individual formation of the essence of religion to be viewed on its own terms. By so emphasizing and even celebrating religious diversity, his approach again broke new ground by rejecting the orthodox and deist presumption that plurality in religion is a bad thing. For Schleiermacher, diversity in religion is no more to be lamented than are variations among nations and cultures. For the sake of a proper grasp of each one’s peculiar identity, Schleiermacher devised a comparative method according to which the essence of every positive religion may be correctly discerned. It consists in the identification of four hallmarks: (i) stage of religious development, (ii) type of religion, (iii) originating event, and (iv) central idea. So, for example, Christianity is a monotheistic religion in terms of its stage of development and it belongs to the `teleological’ type in which the religious consciousness necessarily issues in moral activity (as distinct from the `aesthetic’ type, such as Greco-Roman polytheism, wherein moral activity is not constitutive). Its originating event is the ministry of Jesus and its central idea is redemption from sin. What distinguishes Christianity as specifically `Christian’, therefore, is that all religious affections in it are related to the redemption that Jesus makes possible. Through participation in Jesus’ perfect consciousness of God, which was `a veritable existence of God in him’, Christians are enabled to overcome their own enfeebled God-consciousness (Schleiermacher 2001, § 94, p. 385). In this way, Schleiermacher’s call to respect the positive religions in all their diversity and uniqueness was intended to set the stage for a new appreciation of Christianity in particular. Whereas the category `religion’ is general and thus abstract, Christian faith is something specific and concrete since Christians have their consciousness of God mediated through their redemptive encounter with Jesus. The theologian’s task is descriptive in intent, namely, to explicate this historically given religious experience of Christians. This historicized notion of theology is in full accord with the historical thrust of Schleiermacher’s interpretation of religion.
Hegel’s contributions have to be reckoned as equal in importance to those of Kant and Schleiermacher in terms of their impact upon nineteenth-century theology. He made a bold and daring proposal for a thorough reformulation of the meaning of Christian religion in philosophical categories. Hegel’s thought is the most brilliant example of a movement in German philosophy known as Absolute Idealism. Idealism conceives the ultimate nature of reality to be intellectual or spiritual, in opposition to materialism that teaches that matter is the ultimately real. Although Kant had described his own philosophy as a `critical idealism’, Hegel and the others in this movement sought to move beyond Kant’s strictures on the limits of reason. The debate with Kant revolved around the question of the relation between human knowledge (epistemology) and the nature of reality (metaphysics): can the mind know reality as it is in itself (an sick) or only as it appears to us? Whereas Kant had advanced the latter position, the Idealists were dissatisfied with this since it necessarily issues in agnosticism about what is really and ultimately the case. Hegel did agree with Kant’s critique of classical metaphysics, but not with his rejection of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. So unlike Kant for whom faith in God was a mere postulate of practical reason, Hegel thought of God as the highest object of philosophical knowledge. In this respect, he was conscious that he was taking up anew the question of natural theology. In his case, however, he developed his explicitly metaphysical theology as part of a comprehensive philosophy of religion. The task of the philosophy of religion, according to Hegel, is to demonstrate the rational necessity of religious faith.
The older natural theology, criticized by Hume, had been based on an empiricist epistemology. Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience and from induction based on our observation of the world (a posteriori). Hume, working from a sensationalist interpretation of empiricism wherein only that which is mediated through the five senses counts as experience, toppled the natural theology put forward by the deists by pointing out how far its argument for God actually exceeded the experiential evidence on which it was supposedly based. But Hegel was a rationalist, not an empiricist. Rationalism is the doctrine that reason, apart from experience, can attain genuine knowledge of reality through deduction from first principles (a priori). Hegel’s metaphysical arguments, therefore, are not of the same logical type as those undermined by Hume. Even Kant had opined that only a purely rational argument could ever really secure knowledge of God’s existence, though he judged all previous efforts to propose one (such as the so-called `ontological argument’ of Anselm) to have failed.
Hegel’s philosophy of religion is also to be seen in its sharp contrast to the views on religion and theology set forth by Schleiermacher. Although they were colleagues at the University of Berlin, the two men did not have much in common. Hegel objected to Schleiermacher’s identification of religion as feeling on the ground that it excluded reason from the religious relation, thereby debasing the human being. Hegel quipped that if the essence of religion is to be found in a feeling of absolute dependence, then a dog would be the best Christian! Hegel was also at odds with Schleiermacher’s methodical attempt to avoid any hint of philosophical speculation when undertaking the work of Christian theology. As religion, for Hegel, is knowledge of God, theology cannot be distinct from philosophy, as Schleiermacher mistakenly argued. Properly understood, theology is that branch of philosophy having to do with the knowledge of God.
Whereas the anti-speculative character of Schleiermacher’s theology led him to relegate discussion of the trinitarian doctrine to an appendix of his dogmatic system because the religious consciousness can never know God’s being in its aseity (apart from God’s relation to us), Hegel made the doctrine of the trinity the centerpiece of his philosophical theology. Yet, Hegel’s reformulation of this doctrine is quite different from its classical articulation. The church’s dogmatic tradition teaches about God in the religious form of the `representation’ (Vorstellung), which is an imaginative picture-language. The task of the philosophy of religion is to translate the truth of ecclesial doctrine into the precise language of the `concept’ (Bent’) so as to free its intellectual content from its inadequate representational form. Only then can it be grasped in its real significance as expressing the highest knowledge about God. In pushing beyond the representation to the concept, philosopher is higher than religion. Nonetheless, philosophy also renders an indispensable apologetic service by showing that Christianity is the absolute religion, because only it has the fundamental truth that God is spirit been revealed.
Hegel’s affirmation of God as virit does not refer, as it does in th.e church’s theology, only to the third person of the trinity. His point is that —GiTd—rssiiiii7heFeaTElassical metaphysics had applied the category ‘substance—v–7) God, Hegel insisted that God’s being must be rethought through the category `subject’. Spirit (Geist) is a dynamic concept. It implies an outward movement to that which is other before returning again to itself. Therein is to be found the point of identity between God and humanity. Although the human spirit is finite whereas the divine spirit is infinite, the infinite spirit comes to consciousness of itself only through finite spirit’s knowledge of it. As nature is the state of spirit’s estrangement from itself, the emergence of humanity signifies the breakthrough of spirit into nature. Here spirit attains three forms: `subjective’ spirit in the psychology of individual persons, `objective’ spirit in the legal and political institutions of society, and `absolute’ spirit in art, religion, and philosophy. By means of this developmental history of the human spirit, the divine spirit becomes conscious of itself as `absolute spirit’. The religious relation of the human to God is thus the means of God’s own self-relatedness.
Hegel attempted to reconcile rational necessity and historical contingency. For him, reason is historical and history is rational. The progress of philosophy illustrates the dynamic movement of thought from an initial idea (thesis), to its subsequent contradiction by another idea (antithesis), and then their dialectical reconciliation in a higher unity by means of a third idea (synthesis) preserving the kernel of truth in each albeit shorn of the limitations of their original oppositional formulation. God, the rational structure of reality, is historical; as such, God is dynamic, not static and unchanging as in classical metaphysics and theology. Human history as a whole is the revelation of God, not merely certain events within history as the church has taught. In Hegel’s speculative recasting of it, the profound truth about God disclosed in the doctrine of the trinity is that the infinite must be realized or actualized in and through the finite. The implicit unity of the divine—human spirit became explicit in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. God the Father emptied himself of his transcendence in order to become fully immanent in the world through the Son, thereby giving rise to the emergence of absolute spirit in which the estrangement between infinite and finite is reconciled. History is necessary for this dialectical process of estrangement (thesis), negation (antithesis), and reconciliation (synthesis). As the infinite, God both negates and consummates finitude.
Hegel’s doctrine of God is an illustration of a `pan-en-theism’ (all is in God). According to this type of theism, the world is necessary for God’s own process of becoming. (In the twentieth century, Whitehead’s philosophy and the `process theology’ influenced by it also exemplify this type.) The problem with traditional theology, in Hegel’s mind, is that it represents God as a transcendent being with full self-consciousness apart from God’s self-divestment in the world. In Hegel’s reinterpretation, however, God requires the world and especially human history in order to become absolute spirit. But the world is not, therefore, to be thought of as something external to God. All of God’s relations are internal, which is to say that the world is in God.
Some of Hegel’s followers developed his thought in more radical directions. Strauss was the first to apply the category `myth’ in a consistent manner to the interpretation of the New Testament. The question of how to account for the miracles reported in the Bible had resulted in a stalemate between orthodox theologians who appealed to supernatural intervention and their rationalist opponents who believed that these occurrences had natural causes unknown to the people who witnessed them. Yet, the rationalists assumed, along with the supernaturalists, that the astonishing events reported in the Bible had actually occurred, but they differed only in the question of their correct explanation. By advancing the thesis that the gospel narratives about Jesus are overlaid with myth, Strauss showed that the miraculous elements in the New Testament do not require either a supernatural or a rational-scientific explanation. By `myth’ Strauss meant a religious idea expressed in the form of a historical narrative. The idea expressed in the New Testament is the union between the divine and the human, so that it may truly be said that God is incarnate among us. The form in which this religious idea was expressed by the gospel writers is a myth, a story about a person who completely embodied the idea in his own life. Although Strauss held that biblical scholarship must try to disentangle the actual history of Jesus from the mythical overlay, he was doubtful that historians working with the critical methods of modern historiography could ever attain much reliable information about the historical figure behind the myth. He was especially critical of Schleier-macher’s argument for Jesus’ perfect God-consciousness as an instance of theology parading as history. Yet, Strauss was not at all troubled by this skepticism about our ability to recover the facts of Jesus’ life since he did not consider the historical element in the gospels to be religiously significant. For him, it is through the myth that the Christian idea is conveyed. This means that the idea of the divine—human union, while expressed in the New Testament as a mythical story and subsequently elaborated conceptually in the church’s dogmas, has nothing to do with the historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth. The key to christology, he said, is to understand that the subject of the predicates that the church has applied to an individual person are properly to be applied to the idea. Strauss thereby opened up for nineteenth-century theology the vexing problem of the relation between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith that still remains unresolved to this day. Whereas for the ancient church the fundamental christological problem was that of stating correctly the relation of the two natures (fully divine and fully human) in the one person ofJesus, now the chief problem became that of determining the relation between who Jesus really had been as a figure of ancient history and what the church later taught about him as the divine Son of God. Strauss had thus gone beyond Hegel by employing the distinction between the `representation’ (myth) and the `concept’ (idea) in such a fashion as to unleash the Christian religious idea from its necessary anchor in any historical claims about Jesus. Although Hegel was primarily interested in the metaphysical implications of the christological and trinitarian doctrines, he did not deny that the actual history of both God and humanity had undergone real change in the events narrated in representational form by the church’s dogma. Nonetheless, it can be asked how the content of the religious idea, once it has been rendered conceptually clear by philosophy, depends in any way for its truth on particular facts of history. Hegel did not go that far, but Strauss, exploiting this ambiguity in the master’s teaching, took a radical step beyond Hegel in the direction of what has come to be called `left-wing’ Hegelianism. In the twentieth century Rudolf Bultmann took up anew the question of myth in the New Testament and called for a `de-mythologizing’ of the gospel, though in his case it was not Hegel’s philosophy but the existentialism of Martin Heidegger that provided the conceptuality by means of which Bultmann thought the Christian faith could most properly be interpreted for our time.
It was the possibility of inversion within the Hegelian scheme that led to some of the most forceful anti-theological interpretations of religion in the nineteenth century. Here the critical thinkers were Feuerbach and Marx, both of whom worked with certain Hegelian premises while repudiating any theological intention. Feuerbach turned Hegel’s philosophy on its head by substituting humanity for God as the subject of the dialectical process of self-alienation and reconciliation with itself. Feuerbach believed that what people call `God’ is an illusion resulting from and expressive of humanity’s alienation from its own essence. In theology, humanity projects its alienated self onto the screen of objective reality, thereby arriving at the idea of God. God is humanity’s relinquished self. God is the idea of human nature purified of its individual limitations. The attributes predicated of God are attributes of human nature. God, Feuerbach claimed, is the idea of the species presented as an individual. Anthropology is thus the key to theology. In order for alienated humanity to be reconciled to itself, theology must be overcome and the qualities traditionally predicated of God must be reclaimed as belonging to the very essence of human nature. The biblical statement `God is love’ (1 John 4:8) must be inverted so that what was once understood to be the predicate is now the subject. Therefore, its true, non-theological meaning is that `love is divine’, indicating love of our fellow human being as of ultimate importance. Once humanity’s alienation from the best qualities of its own nature has been overcome through the denial of theism, a new humanism will appear in which the real purpose of the gospel’s message about neighbor-love will find its genuine fulfillment. Feuerbach’s ideas probably resonate with a great many secular or `post-Christian’ people in our culture who, though sharing certain moral values espoused by the church, nonetheless think that religious belief is either unnecessary or even an obstacle to the serious pursuit of these humanistic values (e.g., Albert Camus).
Marx received his initial stimulation from Feuerbach’s inversion of Hegel, but criticized Feuerbach for thinking of human nature as an abstract essence unrelated to particular socio-economic circumstances. For Marx, the critique of religion is the essential prerequisite for a critique of society. Marx was a materialist who believed that the economic relations dominant in any society determine human consciousness. The ideas of a culture, including its religious beliefs, are merely the ideological superstructure that serves both to conceal and to justify the dominant economic relations. The leading ideas at any given time are always the ideas of the ruling class. Under the conditions of modern capitalism, Christianity serves as an opiate to pacify the oppressed workers with the false promise of a happy life after death as a reward for their patient suffering in this life. But the recognition by the workers of the ideological nature of religion will lead to their revolutionary activity on behalf of a socialist society in which all persons will be equal. For Marx, the critique of religion must proceed to the overthrow of the economic conditions that generate the need for religious illusions. In the twentieth century, `liberation theology’, originating in the impoverished slums of Latin America, has attempted to appropriate Marxist social analysis without, however, accepting his theory that all religion is necessarily ideological in his sense. For these theologians, the true meaning of the gospel is political, namely, the liberation of the oppressed.
In spite of the radical character of most nineteenth-century thought, it has to be stressed that many of its most important contributions were made by theologians or philosophers conscious of their continuity with aspects of the Reformation heritage. Kant and Hegel were of Lutheran background and Schleiermacher stood in the tradition of Calvin. Even Feuerbach saw himself as a second Luther initiating a new reformation. While there is not space within this essay to explore in greater detail the continuities and discontinuities between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century, the student of Christian theology should not be misled by the radical character of the latter from seeing the lines that connect it with the former. The liberal theologians of the nineteenth century believed that it was their right and duty precisely as Protestants to undertake revision of the church’s inherited doctrines, even Protestant ones, in light of their own best scholarly interpretation of the meaning and truth of Christian faith. In this regard, they did not claim for their own critical work anything other than what Luther and Calvin had claimed for themselves.
Hence, whatever material differences there were between them with respect to particular doctrinal loci, there was at least a formal continuity in their shared understanding of Protestant theology as a revisionary enterprise from first to last.
How the contributions of the nineteenth century to theology and religious thought should be evaluated today is a contentious matter. Clearly, for some persons, especially intellectuals, the critical impact of the Enlightenment has issued in the complete loss of religious faith as an authentic possibility for modern persons. For them, Nietzsche’s declaration of the `death of God’ in Western culture is an apt description of our existential circumstance. For many theologians in the twentieth century, however, the basic problem of nineteenth-century liberal theology lay in its attempt to meet the challenge of the Enlightenment on its own terms instead of insisting that the starting-point of all Christian theology worthy of its name has to be the faith of the church, contained in the Bible and the creeds. Other theologians continue to find the innovations of the nineteenth century to be worthy of further exploration and development, so that we are not forced to choose between atheism and a repristination of some form of traditional faith. Recently, another group of theologians, identifying themselves with the contemporary philosophical movement known as `postmodernism’, believe that the philosophical presuppositions of the so-called `Enlightenment project’ are faulty and should thus no longer be the starting-point for a contemporary intellectual engagement with the Christian tradition. In any case, it cannot be said that we are through with either the Enlightenment or with the classic responses to it of the nineteenth century. Our job, at the start of a new century, is to sort out all the questions and answers that have been bequeathed to us by the past two centuries to discern whether new syntheses are possible.
Short Biography
Note
* Correspondence address: Paul E. Capetz, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, 3000 Fifth Street N.W., New Brighton, MN 55112, USA. Email: pecapetz@msn.com.
Further Reading
Feuerbach, L, 1957, The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. Harper Torchbooks, New York, NY.
Hegel, G, & Friedrich, W, 1997, G. W F Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit. Edited with an introduction by Peter C. Hodgson.. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Hume, D, 1948, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edited with an introductory essay by Henry D. Aiken. Hafner Press, New York, NY
Kant, I, 1960, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. Harper Torchbooks, New York, NY.
Schleiermacher, F, 1996, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. English translation of the first German edition of 1821. Translated by Richard Crouter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
-, 2001, The Christian Faith. English translation of the second German edition of 1830-31. Translated by HR Macintosh and JS Stewart with a foreword by BA Gerrish. T&T Clark, Edinburgh, UK.
Mercersburg Today 