THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.*
No publishers have done more for the religion of their country than Messrs. T. and T. Clark. Their "Foreign Theological Library " contains about one hundred and ninety volumes of the cream of Protestant works, of which more than one hundred and fifty volumes are by German theo- logians of the orthodox school, including such names as Neander, Bleek, Dorner, Dollinger, Olshausen, and Stier. The book we have before us is well worthy of a place in their Library, for it is unique of its kind, as well as interesting, learned, and charitable. It begins by stating that the form of dogma impressed on Christianity at a given time has been determined in part by the condition of mental culture at that time. At the beginning of the Church it was the philosophy in vogue in the Graeco-Roman world. Consequently the Christian faith and this philosophy are the two factors from whose interaction ecclesiastical dogma arose ; the former supplying the content of it, the latter its form, thus con- firming the opinion of Dr. Hatch in his Hibbert Lectures. Now the idea which was at the core of later Greek philosophy was the Logos or Reason, which expresses the connection between God, the world, and man. It is found as early an Heraclitus, as well as in the Stoics, and was adopted by Philo the Jew, fused with the Platonic tradition, and from him introduced into Christianity as the Mediator. In the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament throughout, except in St. John's G-ospel and the Hebrews, the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven prevails, as well as in the Apostolic Fathers, but in the Apologists of the second century this idea was sup- planted by that of the Logos, though it afterwards obtained ample realisation in the Catholic Church, in the institutions and worship of which it, more than dogma, determined Christian piety down to the Reformation. The authority of the Church depended very much on oral tradition until the Gnostics arose, and the successors of the Apostles collected the remains of the Apostolic writings as a New Testament Canon standing alongside of the Old Testament, and even afterwards an appeal to tradition was necessary to the inter. pretation of Scripture ; and thus traditionalism reigned until the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages had misgivings as to the relations of authority and reason. Erigena gets over the difficulty by saying that true authority is nothing but the truth discovered by the power of reason, whereas Ausehn, seems to invert the principle by his "credo ut intelligam." At any rate reason became to be, for the learned, what authority continued to be for the unlearned. In the later Schoolmen the Philosophy of Aristotle gained undisputed sovereignty, and Aquinas maintained that those dogmas are rational which can be explained by means of that philosophy, but those which cannot are supra rationent.
Protestantism adopted most of the dogmas of the Church, • The Truth or the Christian Religion. By Julius Kaftan, DJ). Translated by Q, rurries, 13,1). Edinburgh 1 T. and T. Clark,
partly because the fanatical movements of the Reformation, obliged it to be careful not to go too fast, and partly because of the great influence of Augustine on evangelical theology in his fundamental doctrine of the solely operating grace of God. Reason thus was second to authority, until Bacon and Descartes, the forerunners of modern science came to the help of the former, and authority became weaker and weaker in comparison with reason, until Kant arose and clipped the wings of both by showing in the .Antinomies of his Critique that pure reason can prove nothing, not even the existence of a God. What then can P His answer is " Practical Reason " in his treatise on that subject. In his "the Only Proof of the Being of God," he shows how it can be done, and, having asserted that Dogma, like a chameleon, changes its form from age to age according to the culture of a nation, he recom- mends in one of his treatises that there should always be a body of learned men to expound Scripture with the improved learning of the age, and adapt dogma to the consciousness of people of that age. In his "Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernmunf t," he himself explains the doctrines of the Son of Man and his sacrifice in a re- markable manner. Kant's modification of dogma was much helped by the Pietists, who, holding dogma in rather a loose manner, laid greater stress on devotion and acts of piety, as well as by the Anfkliirung, the followers of which either, as Deists, gave up dogma altogether, or established it, each man for himself, according to his own inner consciousness. Thus in a great measure dogma was broken up by the influence of Kant, and the same man started the restoration or renovation of it, which has been carried on by German theologians with the aid of practical reason, history, philosophy, and Scripture. Spinosa, since the time of Kant, had influenced the German mind very much in the exclusion of dogma, as may be seen in the works of Leasing and Goethe, as well as of some of the philosophers. The Professor traces the course of the breaking-up of dogma, and of its development by Hegel, &belling, Strauss, Schopen- hauer, and others. Hegel, by philosophy and history, approximated towards dogma; but Strauss helped on the catastrophe of it more than any other man. The Holy Spirit had guided the Church in the development of dogma during the whole of its course, and Dr. Kaftan maintains that the Spirit has continued to do so in the breaking-up of it also; which, to us, is quite a new idea, and not at all to our mode of thinking, unless he can prove that the catastrophe has resulted in the development of dogmas more sound and more scriptural than those which were accepted by the Church, both Pro- testant and Catholic, down to the time of the catastrophe. However, even Strauss gave some help towards its redevelop- ment by pointing to history as necessary to this movement. He says : "The subjective initials= of the individual is a tiny stream which any child can keep back for a while, but the objective criticism which is consummated in the course of centuries hurls itself forward like a roaring torrent, against which all sluices and dams are of no avail."
In the beginning of the second volume—for the preceding history of dogma, which takes up the whole of the first volume, is but an introduction to the main subject—the author seeks a starting-point, and this he finds in knowledge and reason, which he discusses in 303 pp., leaving only 120 pp for the proof of Christianity. We have not space to give even an outline of this second introduction, for he introduces all kinds of knowledge—common and ideal knowledge, science logic, and mathematics—and ends with his conclusion l—" Of the two methods of explaining the world, one of these methods directs us to extend that knowledge of the world which is conformable to experience, and in that way to arrive at the highest knowledge, that of the First Cause and Final Purpose. The other is the Speculative Method, which bases the explana- tion of the world on definite Ideas which have somehow come to be certain to the mind of man, so that he further derives from them the highest and what may strictly be regarded as the final interpretation of the world ; the first method is false and a mistaken way ; if the highest grade of knowledge is to be reached at all, it must be by the Speculative path," and along this path we will quickly follow him.
What has to he proved, is that only the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God, as the chief good of humanity, answers to the requirements which must be made of the true, rational, absolutely valid idea of the chief good. The factor which
preponderates in human consciousness is the will more than the intellect ; for the former tells the latter what kind of knowledge to apply itself to, though in seeking for the chief good not only must a man consult his own moral conscious- ness, but use his intellect in following the course of the history of his own race, as the goal of history is the chief good. Here Comte's "Law of Social Statics" deserved con- sideration; that in a given state of society all the con- ditions are dependent on one another, and must mutually correspond to one another; but Comte fails to observe that there are two factors of our mental life combined into a unity—knowledge and religious faith rooted in feeling which he afterwards corrected by coming for- ward as the founder of a religion. But nowhere is the chief good itself found in history, just as it is nowhere found in the world around us. If optimism points out its existence, pessimism starts up and puts it to shame. If then it is not in the world, it must be sought as one which is above the world- i.e., in the sense of religion—as participation in a life which is not of the world, the life of God. Not in culture, as the Greeks, the most cultured race, prove, but in religion, which explains the world, teaching that it proceeds eternally from God and eternally returns to Him, and prescribes a corre- sponding rule of life, the most conspicuous element of which is renunciation of the world, the principal matter being the mystical entrance of the soul into itself to find union there with God. The tendency of all moral legislation reaches its completion in the Christian ideal of a universal Kingdom of moral righteousness on earth,—the Kingdom of God, the Christian law of love to mankind universally; that we must not merely let every one have his own, but must help and promote the good of every person who is put by God in our way,—not a mere theory, but a duty common to all. So far, the exist- ence of the Kingdom of God is a postulate of reason ; but as that Kingdom is also supra-mundane and invisible—the Kingdom of perfection belonging to the future heavenly world—it must have been proclaimed in the world, in history, by a divine revelation, and so the proof of the truth of Christianity is the proof of the reasonableness and absolute- ness of the faith reposed in the Christian revelation, and thus reason and revelation meet in the same conception of the chief good. What attests revelation as such is the need shown by reason ; that on which reason as such rests, and to which it appeals, is the existence of revelation. Now, the content of revelation is not only the Kingdom of God, but the Atonement, which is essentially Christian, for the latter is necessary if the former is to be attained. Man's self- consciousness and history tell us of the existence of sin, which would exclude him from the Kingdom. Thus there is no contradiction between reason and Faith; what the former teaches us is relative knowledge, whereas Faith knows of an absolute knowledge, and has to do with an absolute purpose. " The finding of a unity between both may, in particular cases, involve a practical problem, which no one can solve without prayer and the assistance of the Holy Spirit." In the ease of miracles, the Christian holds to the truth that the earth is the Lord's, that everything comes from him, and that he can use extraordinary means to enable Faith to trace his presence and omnipotence.
Therefore, the historical person of Jesus Christ, his relation to the Father, and his atonement, form the foundation of dogma, which is the science of the objects of Faith, attained to by man's self-consciousness, reason, experience, and by history. By the same faculties and the same helps we reach the same goal; but we go further and express ourselves con- tented with the body of dogma provided for us by the Catholic Church, which contains all that is necessary for the satisfac- tion of Christian faith.
We have only one fault to find with this remarkable book, —that it lacks proportion ; the history of dogma is too long, and the proof of Christianity too short. Probably the latter may be compensated for in the author's previous work on the Nature of the Christian Religion, which has not yet been trans- lated. We are glad to learn from Dr. Flint's preface that the revival of Kant's influence in philosophy, and to a certain point in theology, is being carried on by the Neo-Kantians, Hitachi, Hermann, Dr. Kaftan, and others, and that the trans- lation of this work has been exceptionally well executed, it being "an accurate and even elegant rendering," to which we may add that it is clear from beginning to end.
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