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Christless Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Benjamin B. Warfield
Benjamin B. Warfield
Affiliation:
Princeton Theological Seminary
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Extract

The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews was published early in 1909, and before the year was out its author was being requisitioned by dissidents from Christianity of the most incongruous types as a promising instrument for the general anti-christian propaganda. Few more remarkable spectacles have ever been witnessed than the exploitation throughout Germany in the opening months of 1910 of this hyper-idealistic metaphysician, disciple of von Hartmann and convinced adherent of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” by an Alliance the declared basis of whose organization is a determinate materialism. As, under the auspices of the Monistenbund, he made his progress from city to city, lecturing and debating, he drew a tidal-wave of sensation along with him. A violent literary war was inaugurated. It seemed as if all theological Germany were aroused.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , October 1912 , pp. 423 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1912

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References

1 Drews, Arthur, Die Christusmythe, Jena, 1909Google Scholar, and many subsequent editions. English translation: The Christ Myth, by Arthur Drews, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy in the Techn. Hochschule, Karlsruhe. Translated from the third edition (revised and enlarged) by C. Delisle Burns, M.A. London, [1910].

2 As by the Christliche Freiheit, February 13, 1910.

3 Die evangelische Kirchenzeitung, March 6, 1910.

4 “Die törichte Frage” (Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu für den Glauben, 1911, p. 2).

5 “Beschämend” (Neue Freie Presse, May 15, 1910, reprinted in Aus Wissenschaft und Leben, 1911, vol. ii, p. 167).

6 See the whole document in the Christliche Welt, April 28, 1910, pp. 402 ff.

7 Hermann Reuter, Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, 1875, 1877, gives mediaeval instances.

8 Perhaps the most thoroughgoing expression of it is given by Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Eng. trans.2, 1881, p. 209: “He therefore who loves man for the sake of man, who rises to the love of the species, to universal love, adequate to the nature of the species, he is a Christian, is Christ himself.” Auguste Sabatier, however, in his ultimate statement, scarcely falls short of this. Christianity, he tells us, is the religion “of universal redemption by love,” that is everybody's love for everybody. (The Doctrine of the Atonement in its Historical Evolution, Eng. trans., 1904, p. 134.)

9 Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, in Lachmann's edition of Lessing's sämtliche Schriften, vol. xiii, pp. 1–8.

10 Otto Kirn, Glaube und Geschichte, 1900, pp. 9–10, remarks on Lessing's double point of view and the consequent confusion in his argument: “The position of the critic appears upon more exact consideration as little sure. He attacks his adversary at once from two standpoints which are not in harmony. He asserts with the Wolffian Dogmatism that reason can never receive its convictions through history. To this standpoint, however, self-experienced and past facts are alike unimportant and inconclusive, when the question concerns religious or ethical propositions. Then he comes forward in the armor of the historical critic, who is ready to let himself be convinced by facts if only they be certainly established, and authenticated by self-experienced analogies: the training of his critical judgment forbade him, however, to draw far-reaching conclusions from facts which ‘act through a medium,’ and remain controversial. As a Wolffian he could not openly concede what as historian of certainly authenticated facts he declared himself ready to grant. Lessing's vacillation between dogmatic rationalism and critical empiricism manifests itself in this double attitude towards history: with the one he belongs to the Enlightenment, with the other he is preparing the way for a time which would be able to see in history something better than a source of ‘obscure and confused ideas’ (cf. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, § 33, 9).”

11 A lucid sketch of the history of opinion on the relations of faith and history is given in pp. 1–27 of Otto Kirn's Glaube und Geschichte, 1900. See also Karl Dunkmann, Das religiöse Apriori und die Geschichte, 1910, pp. 11–51, and the admirable general account by Hodge, C. W., in the article, “Fact and Theory” in Hastings's Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, vol. i, 1908, pp. 562–567, esp. 564–565.Google Scholar

12 Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, 1901, pp. 34–35.

13 Published in 1905: Eng. trans., The Truth of Religion, 1911, pp. 33–34.

14 Können wir noch Christen sein? 1911, p. 37. Eucken, in this work, asks if we can still be Christians, and answers yes,—but only by remoulding Christianity to fit our new philosophy which will not hear of a divine Redeemer or an expiatory redemption. “We have asked,” he says in his closing words (p. 236), “whether we of today can still be Christians. We reply that not only can we be, but we must be. We can be Christians, however, only if Christianity be recognized to be a world-historical movement still in flux, if it be shaken out of its ecclesiastical petrifaction and placed upon a broader basis. In this are found the task of our time and the hope of the future.”

15 “Vom Nutzen und Schaden der Historie für das Leben,” in Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1874, vol. ii2, p. 210.

16 Hibbert Journal, January, 1907, pp. 258–276: cf. esp. p. 269.

17 Article, “Glaube und Geschichte” in Schiele and Zscharnack, Die Religion, vol. ii, coll. 1450–1452.

18 Lovejoy must not be thought singular in this suggestion: it is found also in the philosophers of whom he serves himself heir—for instance, in Kant and in Fichte; and it is intrinsic to the general point of view.

19 Christliche Welt, February 17, 1910, p. 147.

20 Die moderne Bibelwissenschaft und die Krisis der evangelischen Kirche, Tübingen, 1910, see especially pp. 99–100.

21 Christliche Welt, May 5, 1910, p. 413.

22 Ibid.

23 Die moderne Bibelwissenschaft, etc., p. 101. Cf. the very similar representation of Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity of Jesus, 1912, pp. 306–307.

24 Christliche Welt, February 17, 1910, p. 749.

25 Christliche Welt, May 12, 1910, p. 441.

26 Cf. Otto Kirn, Glaube und Geschichte, 1900, p. 22: “According to what has been said, we may trace back to Schleiermacher the idea which recurs through the nineteenth century in manifold modifications, that the figure of the Redeemer, ever only uncertainly or indistinctly established by historical research, is lifted, by the experience of his redemptive power continuing in the community, to a certainty and clearness sufficient for faith. The effect of Christ, capable of being experienced by every man seeking redemption, permits (so it is said) the inference to a personality standing at the head of the community, and in union with God, even if we cannot otherwise come to know anything whatever about him that is historically assured.”

27 Cf. what is said of Kähler and Herrmann as representatives of historical skepticism with respect to the “historical Jesus” by Otto Ritschl in an article entitled, “Der geschichtliche Christus, der christliehe Glaube, und die theologische Wissenschaft” in the Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. iii, 1893, pp. 373 f. “There is accordingly at present no Rationalistic tendency, threatening to bring into question the value for theology of historical investigation. It is true, however, that the confidence which has been hitherto overwhelmingly felt in the result of theological historical research is made doubtful by a skeptical mood which seems to be gaining ground with many theologians…. To this skeptical mood … Kähler has hitherto given the strongest expression.” But Herrmann “shares Kähler's historical skepticism, ascribing to historical research the ability to attain only probable judgments.” “In spite of these unfavorable judgments as to the capacity of historical science, Kähler and Herrmann are too deeply persuaded of the nature of Christianity as an historical religion not to lay stress on this—that the Christ which historical research cannot reach with its instruments, but is laid hold of now by faith, is the historical Christ. In contrast with him Kähler speaks of the ‘so-called historical Jesus’ as a creature of phantastic arbitrariness.” See also Dunkmann, Karl, Das religiöse Apriori und die Geschichte, 1911, pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

28 American Journal of Theology, July, 1911, pp. 362–372; January, 1912, pp. 106–110.

29 American Journal of Theology, October, 1911, pp. 584–594.

30 Hibbert Journal, October, 1909, pp. 100–101.

31 Jesus in Modern Criticism, Eng. trans., 1907, p. 85.

32 Compare the description of this type of thought by Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity of Jesus, 1912, pp. 319 f.

33 In his address at the Berlin Congress of Free Christianity, 1910, under the title, Die Bedeutung der Person Jesu für den Glauben. History according to Bousset gives us only symbols, which cannot demonstrate, but only illustrate, the eternal ideas that reside in our bosoms. Founders of religions, Jesus among them, as historical entities, have their place among these symbols. Neither the certainty nor the contents of our faith can find its grounding in symbols. On the one hand, as regards Jesus, “What do we know that is historically certain of this Jesus of Nazareth, his life, his teaching and his person” (p. 4). Yet, on the other, “the portrait of Jesus as it is depicted in the gospels by his immediate community, as romance and truth, remains and will remain more effective than all attempts at historical reconstruction, however exact they may be” (p. 17). Effective, that is, as a symbol; for as Wobbermin (Geschichte und Historie in der Religionswissenschaft, 1911, pp. 47 f.) points out, Bousset leaves to Jesus no significance as source of religion.

34 See the striking passage on the radical evil which afflicts the human race in Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, 1st ed., 1901, pp. 72 f.; The Truth of Religion, 1911, pp. 96 f.

35 Otto Kirn, Glaube und Geschichte, 1900, pp. 47–48. Cf. the whole passage, pp. 47–50.

36 Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 1898, p. 200, article on “Die geschichtliche Gewissheit und der Glaube an Jesus Christus.” Compare also his lecture on Jesus Christus in der Geschichte, Tübingen, 1912, where the discussion is more popular in form.

37 Ueber die Gesetze des historischen Wissens, 2d ed., 1864, p. 17; or in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1874, p. 11.

38 Tennant, F. R., “Historical Fact in Relation to the Philosophy of Religion.” Hibbert Journal, vol. viii, 1909–1910, p. 173.Google Scholar

39 Lovejoy, A. O., Hibbert Journal, vol. v, January, 1907, p. 269Google Scholar. Cf. the much more cautious statement of Ritschl, O., Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. iii, 1893, p. 376Google Scholar. Per contra, cf. Eberhard Vischer, Jesus Christus in der Geschichte, 1912, pp. 35 f.: had the historical records preserved for us no single intimation of the existence of a Dante, the existence of the Divina Commedia would compel his postulation, and had historical records preserved for us no single intimation of the existence of Jesus Christ,—or, what comes to the same thing, should historical criticism obliterate every existing intimation of his existence,—there are effects about us, quite as palpable as the Divina Commedia, which would compel his postulation.

40 Lessings sämtliche Schriften, Lachmann's ed., 1897, vol. xiii, p. 120.

41 The value of the argument from effects in establishing historical facts is expounded at length by Eberhard Vischer as cited above, and applied in detail to the facts of the Christian origins. Cf. the review of the lecture, Jesus Christus in der Geschichte, in the Princeton Theological Review for October, 1912.

42 Christliche Welt, February 17, 1910, pp. 162–163.

43 Axiomata, 1778; Lessings sämtliche Schriften, Lachmann's ed., 1897, vol. xiii, p. 134. Lessing is in this passage defending this proposition as previously made by him, and denying that he considers this experimental evidence the only convincing evidence of the truth of Christianity.

44 “Jesus,” says Erich Foerster (Christliche Welt, 1909, no. 52, p. 1249), “is a fact in the history of our race, and this fact cannot be eliminated by any dilettantism, however scientifically garnished. He who does not wish to turn his back on all reality must recognize it and adjust himself to it.”

45 Heinrich Weinel, Ist das “liberale” Jesusbild widerlegt? 1910, has been particularly candid in chiding his colleagues for their excesses in the one direction and their shortcomings in the other.

46 On the Ritschlian attitude to historical facts and its sequences cf. Cremer, E., “Der Glaube und die Thatsachen,” in Greifswalder Studien: theologische Abhandlungen Hermann Cremer … dargebracht, 1895, pp. 261–283;Google ScholarVos, G., “Christian Faith and the Truthfulness of the Bible History,” in Princeton Theological Review, vol. iv, 1906, pp. 289–305.Google Scholar

47 Richard Rothe even a half-century ago sounded a warning against attempting to root faith in the merely historical Jesus, who lived and died two thousand years ago. “If,” he declared, “this Christ is not to be altogether ignored and stricken out of history, if he is to be permitted to play any rôle and to be believed in at all, he must absolutely be conceived also as the living Christ.”

48 S. J. Case, as cited, p. 321.

49 American Journal of Theology, vol. xv, July, 1911, pp. 304 f.Google Scholar

50 Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu für den Glauben, Tübingen, 1911. Cf. the review of it in the Princeton Theological Review for October, 1912.

51 “Umwandelung,” p. 8.

52 “In the central position of the personality of Jesus, Christianity does not possess a distinguishing peculiarity, separating it from all other religions, and for the first time making redemption possible, but only fulfils a general law of the spiritual life of man after a fashion peculiar to itself” (p. 42).

53 Troeltsch's remarks in this connection provide a useful commentary upon the discussion in his Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Geschichte, 1902. The adherents of Christianity as of all other religions, he tells us there, live in a naïve belief in the absoluteness of their religion, due to failure to compare it with others and a natural estimate of their actual knowledge of the higher life as ultimate and unique. Christianity's claim to absoluteness is, no doubt, the most inwardly free and universal of all; and when Christianity has attained its new form, in which alone it appeals to modern man, it comes near to justification. Troeltsch can even say: “The claim itself”—i.e. to absoluteness—”has nowhere as yet been refuted or surmounted, and no imagination is capable of excogitating such a surmounting; and so it remains that no other foundation is laid for the soul's health of mankind except Jesus Christ” (p. 126). After a while, however, we here learn, it is possible that a new and better foundation may be laid. On the whole matter cf. Hodge, C. W., “The Finality of the Christian Religion,” in Biblical and Theological Studies by the Faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, 1912, especially pp. 477 f.; also F. X. Kiefl, Der geschichtliche Christus und die moderne Philosophie, pp. 61–74.Google Scholar

54 Otto Kirn, Glaube und Geschichte, 1900, pp. 31–32, speaking of the demand of faith for absoluteness, remarks: “A simply provisional revelation, a merely relative religious truth, an only probable reconciliation with God, and a purely conjectural assurance of salvation,—these are, not merely for a church, but for the religious nature, intolerable ideas. A religion which would see in Christ only a transition point of the religious development of mankind would have, even in an historical judgment, no right whatever to call itself Christian.”

55 J. Weiss, Jesus von Nazareth, 1910, p. 7: “That the ‘essence of Christianity’ is to be found not merely in the New Testament, but in the entire fulness of its historical phenomena, there should today be no longer doubt.” Cf. E. Vischer, Ist die Wahrheit des Christentums zu beweisen? 1902, p. 16.

56 Emil Sulze may be adduced in passing as a witness to this fact. Writing on “Die notwendige Umgestaltung der evangelischen Glaubenslehre” (Protestantische Monatshefte, vol. xi, 1907, p. 250), he declares that “the greatest danger has been brought, as to the moral life so also to faith in God, by the circumstance that the old Protestantism held fast to the foundation-stone of Catholicism, to the doctrine of the substitutive satisfaction of Christ.” He is deeply grieved, therefore, that the Protestant churches of Germany still sing:

Mein Gewissen beisst mich nicht,
Moses kann mich nicht verklagen.
Der mich frei und ledig spricht,
hat die Schulden abgetragen.

To make it truly “Christian,” this verse, he declares, must be transformed into this:

Klagt mich mein Gewissen an,
lässt doch Gott mich nicht verzagen,
stärkt mich auf der Leidensbahn,
hilft mir Schuld und Strafe tragen.

The antipodal attitudes to redemption of the Old Protestantism and the “transformation” which would fain present itself as a New Protestantism could not be more vividly expressed.

57 It is of course generally recognized that Christianity is in its essence a religion of redemption. See for example its exposition as such by Eucken, The Truth of Religion, Eng. trans., 1911, pp. 10 f., where Christianity is described as specifically the religion of redemption from sin. But, as Troeltsch expresses it, the idea of redemption has been “transformed” to suit modern notions. It often happens, therefore, that definitions of Christianity recognize the specific peculiarity of Christianity in words while evaporating it in meaning. Thus Schleiermacher (Glaubenslehre, § 11), describes Christianity as “a monotheistic form of faith belonging to the teleological tendency of piety, distinguished from other similar forms of faith essentially by this—that in it everything is referred to redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.” Here the wide genus to which Christianity is assigned is monotheistic religion, and the proximate genus, teleological (that is, ethical monotheistic) religion, while its differentia within this proximate genus is found in the fact that “in it everything is referred to redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.” If they could be read without reference to the special use of terms by their framers, definitions such as this might be taken as loose descriptions of what Christianity really is. They bear witness to the difficulty experienced by writers of a different point of view in escaping from accustomed terminology.

58 Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. iii, 1893, p. 388. In the number of the Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche for July, 1912 (pp. 244–268), which has come to hand since this article was sent to the printer, Wilhelm Fresenius subjects Troeltsch's Lecture to a detailed criticism from the Ritschlian standpoint and in the name of the Ritschlians repudiates the representation that the historicity of Jesus is indispensable to faith. Ritschlians mean only, it seems, that they themselves find in Jesus what they need for faith: they do not mean that others may not attain faith by some other way (p. 250). With them “faith rests not on ‘historischen’ but on ‘geschichtlichen’ facts,” that is to say, on genuine “life-experiences”; and (p. 262) “accordingly faith can look quietly on while criticism does its work, and openly accept its results: it could even endure that the unhistoricity of Jesus should be proved—a thing which, to be sure, has not been done and which sober historical criticism, moreover, will scarcely maintain is likely to be done in the future,—but in principle this case would not turn the scale for faith, that is, so long as faith remains conscious that it is of historical (geschichtlichen) nature and the historical (geschichtliche) fact on which it bases itself ultimately, can be neither established nor refuted by historical (historischen) science. According to Fresenius, therefore, it is a matter of indifference to Ritschlians whether there ever was any “historical Jesus” or not: it is only necessary that they should have had a genuine “experience.” This is a full-fledged “christless Christianity.”Google Scholar

59 American Journal of Theology, vol. xvi, January, 1912, p. 110.Google Scholar

60 The Doctrine of the Atonement, and its Historical Evolution, Eng. trans., 1904, pp. 123, 133. Cf. also the review of the book in the Princeton Theological Review, vol. iii, 1905, pp. 508–509.

61 Cf. especially Vicarious Sacrifice, New York, 1866, p. 107, and 2d ed., vol. i, New York, 1877, p. 107.

62 American Journal of Theology, vol. xv, October, 1911, pp. 614–617. For an uncompromising assertion of the point of view here intimated by Mathews see J. Warschauer, Jesus: Seven Questions, 1908, pp. 206–233; “Is Belief in Him Necessary?” Warschauer has no hesitation in declaring that “there is no room in a civilized theology for a doctrine which would limit salvation to those professing any one form of religious belief” (p. 230).Google Scholar

63 This is not nowadays a rare point of view. Emil Sulze, for example, who is very much afraid the honor due to God shall be accorded to Jesus, gives repeated expression to it. Paul Mehlhom (Protestantische Monatshefte, vol. v, 1901, p. 190) describes Sulze's view, with references to his Wie ist der Kampf um die Bedeutung der Person und des Wirkens Jesu zu beendigen? 1901, as follows: “Although now Sulze emphasizes that faith is an immediate work of God in us, so that there are circumstances in which it cau arise without the mediation of acquaintance with Christ and the church, yet it would be in his view a terrible loss for the individual if he did not permit himself to be helped forward and given assurance in this matter by history and its pioneering personalities. Just as a German statesman ‘who had not formed himself on Stein and Bismarck must remain a pitiable beginner’ (p. 34), so for the clarifying and establishment of our faith, ‘the person of every child of God’ is ‘for us a means of grace in God's hand,’ while Christ is and abides ‘by his unique vocation … the perfectly unique means of grace for us’ (p. 35).”

Sulze, however, is more hospitable to the idea of the independence of “Christian” faith of Christ than Mathews. Neither complete peace nor complete assurance can be had, he urges, without a free attitude towards Jesus himself. And quite after the manner of Macintosh, he argues: “And is the attitude to God which is here described not the same as that which, according to all that we know of him, was occupied by Christ himself? He did not win love to his Father in Heaven in dependence on an historical person. God himself gave him what he revealed by him” (Protestantische Monatshefte, vol. xi, 1907, p. 247). His views as to the dispensability of Jesus are more or less clearly expressed in a number of articles in the Protestantische Monatshefte.

64 Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. iii, 1893, pp. 380–388.Google Scholar

65 The Finality of the Christian Religion, 2d ed., 1909, p. 331.

66 Der alte und der neue Glaube, 1872, p. 90; cf. p. 143.

67 Herman Bavinck, Magnalia Dei, 1909, p. 312.