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Modern Ideas of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Arthur Cushman McGiffert
Arthur Cushman McGiffert
Affiliation:
Union Theological Seminary
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Extract

Modern ideas of God are many and various, but all of them, so far as they are not mere reproductions of traditional views handed down from the past, are dominated by one or the other of two independent tendencies, which took their rise respectively from Spinoza and from Kant. In this article it is impossible to follow the various ramifications of these tendencies. They are often found together in the same theologian in curious and even inconsistent combinations. I desire to distinguish them sharply the one from the other, and to study them separately as they appear in a few of their most notable and consistent representatives. The former tendency, as I have said, took its rise from Spinoza. Despised and neglected by the leaders of European thought for nearly a hundred years after his death, he finally came to his rights, and was speedily a dominant force in Germany, which was about to assume again the intellectual leadership of Europe held in the eighteenth century successively by England and France. The time was ripe for Spinoza's philosophy. Reaction against the extreme individualism and superficial rationalism of the period was growing rapidly, and the profound and massive monism of the great Jewish sage was fitted to appeal to the imagination of the new age. The first important utterance was Herder's little work entitled Gott, which appeared in 1787 and had wide influence. In this book Herder interprets Spinoza in the light of Leibnitz's dynamic conception of the universe, and so supplements his unity of substance with an all-pervasive unity of force.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , January 1908 , pp. 10 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1908

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References

1 For a fuller description of Herder's book, reference may be made to my article in the Hibbert Journal for July, 1905.

2 English translation by John Oman, “On Religion,” etc., 1893.

3 Vorlesungen über die Philosophic der Religion, 2d ed., Berlin, 1840, I, 202.

4 Ibid. I, 90.

5 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, I, 193.

6 Ibid. I, 202.

7 Ibid. I, 126.

8 Hartenstein's edition of Kant's Works, IV, 267.

9 Von einen neuerdings vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie, I, 188.

10 Ueber die Fortschritte der Metaphysik seit Leibnitz und Wolff, III, 463.

11 Ueber die Fortschritte der Metaphysik seit Leibnitz und Wolff, III, 476.

12 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, IV, 267.

13 See his Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, 1785.

14 See especially his Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, 1811, and the introduction to his philosophical writings prefixed to his treatise on Hume in the collected edition of his Works.

15 Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, III, 17.

16 Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, III, 189.