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BI 3322 (Part 4). Church History: From the 16 th to the 20 th Centuries.
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BI 3322 (Part 4) Church History: From the 16th to the 20th Centuries
April 18, 1587: English Protestant historian John Foxe, author of Actes and Monuments of Matters Happenning to the Church (the shorter version is now known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs), dies at age 71 (see issue 72: How We Got Our History).
April 18, 1874: Having died nearly a year earlier (May 1, 1873) in what is now northern Zambia, missionary-explorer David Livingstone (whose remains had been brought, as his tombstone reads, "by faithful hands over land and sea") is interred in London's Westminster Abbey (see issue 56: David Livingstone).
Where does the Apostles' Creed come from? • A. After Jesus' death and resurrection, the apostles got together to decide on a common statement of faith, with each apostle suggesting one clause. • B. The emperor Constantine, who had converted to Christianity in 312, had his theological advisors compose a creed that would impose uniformity of belief on everyone in his empire. • C. In the second century, Roman Christians used an early form of the text in the form of questions ("Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?") posed to candidates for baptism. • D. We're not sure who wrote it, but the text comes from an apocryphal book from the fourth century, attributed to the apostle Peter.
Answer: (C) The wording of these early baptismal "creeds" eventually evolved into what we now know as the "Apostles' Creed" by the 8th century. If you answered (a) you are in good company—Rufinus of Aquileia in his Commentary on the Apostles' Creed (ca. 400), argued that this is how the creed had come into being.
The Rise of Romanticism • Longing for the beauty and tranquility of the past, a war-weary Europe began to express renewed interest in the supernatural and the idealism of nature. • The result was the Romantic Movement, which flourished from 1760 to 1870. • The Romanticists insisted that experience includes more than analytical reasoning and scientific experiment—that it also includes imagination, feeling and intuition. • The Deists searched for a universal creed, while the Romanticists espoused variety as the very essence of religious experience.
The Rise of Romanticism • The Romantic Movement was not a precise system so much as a mood and a tendency, yet it was very explicit in the works of this period. • Literature, art, philosophy and theology often overlapped in the quest for a new concept of experience that would transcend the rationalism and moralism of the 18th century; we will note its influence in theology only.
The Rise of Romanticism • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) had a lasting impact on English theology and became known as the “father of the Broad Church Movement.” • Through C., German Romanticism and Idealistic philosophy were introduced into British intellectual life. • He taught that the Bible’s spiritual authority lies “in its fitness to our nature and our needs”; he contended that divine revelation is neither a wholly objective or subjective reality but requires both poles, objective fact and existential appropriation.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
The Rise of Romanticism • At the same time Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) deeply influenced Germany; he is often considered to be the dominant theologian between Calvin and Karl Barth; his theology is the most forceful statement of the Romantic and liberal understanding of the Christian religion. • His On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), was an attempt to win the educated classes back to religion, which he defined as “a sense and taste for the infinite.”
The Rise of Romanticism • His systematic theology and his masterpiece was The Christian Faith (1821-22). • He began, not with the dogmas of the past, but with an inward analysis of himself; he became aware of a sense of dependence on something beyond himself and concluded that this awareness was God-consciousness, the source of all religion; from this he developed his theory of the feeling of Absolute Dependence. • The claims of faith did not represent objective knowledge, but expressions of devout self-consciousness or the Christian’s inner experience.
The Rise of Romanticism • The ceremonies and doctrines of religion are always preceded by devout self-consciousness, God-consciousness, and the absolute feeling of dependence; it was Christ’s perfect God-consciousness that constituted his divinity, and he redeems men by inspiring God-consciousness in them. • Thus we are dependent on Jesus, but orthodox doctrines such as the resurrection and second coming of Christ are not essential. • His emphasis on feeling as the basis of religion was a reaction against both rationalism and formal orthodoxy.
The Rise of Liberalism • S. is credited with being the father of Liberal Protestantism which originated in the 19th c. reached its zenith in the decades before World War II. • It to link S. with Liberalism is strange in the sense that his theology was Romantic, a reaction against rationalism; and Liberalism was a continuance of rationalism; but it was his thesis that all doctrines must be shown to be directly related to the religious self-consciousness that opened the way for radical examination of previously unquestioned orthodox doctrines.
The Rise of Liberalism • Liberalism was characterized by an eagerness to discard old orthodox forms if they were judged to be irrational in the light of modern knowledge or irrelevant to what was regarded as the central core of religious experience. • The second criterion (the central core of religious experience) came directly from Schleiermacher; the first criterion (the light of modern knowledge) came directly from G. W. G. Hegel.
The Rise of Liberalism • Hegel’s dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was postulated on an essentially evolutionary view of the universe; his system involved not only the natural sciences but also such disciplines as history, law, aesthetics and religion. • Truth lay in the whole; he did away with distinctions between the world of things and the world of the spirit, insisting rather that all things are the result of the growth of spirit toward the ideal. • His reasoning method opened the way for analyzing how things are evolved, even the Scriptures; his premise was that Absolute Spirit was manifesting itself in the historical process.
The Rise of Liberalism • F. C. Baur (1792-1860) used Hegel’s methodology to develop his methods of biblical criticism. • B. saw Peter’s portrayal of Jesus as the thesis and Paul’s as the antithesis, with the early church creeds becoming the synthesis; from this basis he proceeded to determine which NT books were written by Paul and which were not. • His conclusions were not as important as the fact that he opened the way for “scientific” research on the Bible. • He founded the Tubingen School (a school of NT theologians who tried to apply Hegel’s conception of development to primitive Christianity.
The Rise of Liberalism • David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) was a pupil of Baur and strongly influenced by Schleiermacher and Hegel. • Applying Hegelianism to the NT, he wrote his Life of Jesus in 1835, portraying Jesus as simply a man who was raised to the mythical status of Christ by the messianic expectations of his time; he denied the historical validity of many of the Gospel narratives and set the pace for others to work on the NT books in an effort to establish their historical value.
David Fredrich Strauss
The Rise of Liberalism • Another Life of Jesus (1863) was written by Ernest Renan (1823-92), who presented Jesus as the enlightened modern man of rationalism as opposed to the orthodox Christ that had been known for 17 centuries; he rejected the accounts of the miracles as being unscientific and untenable. • Baur, Strauss, and Renan represented an era in which serious theologians were applying general historical principles to the Bible; these principles presupposed that the biblical documents were human and that it was possible to ask if the events recorded in the documents were true.
The Rise of Liberalism • Such inquiry led to questions like: What are the most reliable biblical texts? What are the sources the authors used? What are the relationships of these sources to other oral and written materials of the time? What was the author’s purpose and intention? • Protestant conservatives attacked the “higher criticism,” and the RCC established the Biblical Commission (1902) to make sure that no Roman Catholic scholar advocated historical views alien to church dogma.
The Rise of Liberalism • The new Liberalism of the 19th c. agreed with S. that religious faith must be grounded in experience, but it pointed out that S. failed to see that Christian experience is only appropriated through the existence of particular, objective events in history; thus the new call was “back to the historical sources,” and the theological response to that was the Ritschlian school of theology whose influence dominated Protestant though in Germany from 1875 to WW I and in America from 1900 to as late as 1930.
The Rise of Liberalism • The Ritschlian school was a perfect expression of Protestant Liberal theology because of its skepticism concerning metaphysics, its rejection of church dogma and natural theology, its concentration on the historical Jesus and his moral teachings, and the idea of the kingdom of God as the communion of spiritually free persons. • The school was named after Albert Ritschl (1822-89).
The Rise of Liberalism • For Ritschl, religion was not located in feelings, as with Schleiermacher, nor in metaphysical knowledge, as with Hegel—but in practical experience of moral freedom; we apprehend by faith, not by reason, and this faith rests not on the intellectual apprehension of a series of facts but on the making of value-judgment. • R. also insisted that it was to community, not to individuals, that the gospel was, and still is, committed; the final purpose of God for redeemed man is the moral integration of humanity into the kingdom of God.
The Rise of Liberalism • One of R’s outstanding disciples was Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), German historian and foremost Patristic scholar of the time. • H. applied R’s critical methodology to the field of church history, maintaining that the metaphysics which came into Christian theology was an alien intrusion from Greek sources. • In his later years, he stressed the moral side of Christianity, especially the claims of human brotherhood, to the exclusion of all that was doctrinal. • In summary, the Ritschlian school was characterized by its stress on ethics and on the “community,” and its repudiation of metaphysics and religious experience.
The Rise of Liberalism • The student of Ritschl who became the most extreme in his rejection of traditional religious doctrine and values was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). • The Nazism of Hitler’s Germany has often been seen as a product, or at least a by-product, of Nietzsche’s philosophy; 20th c. Nihilism definitely had roots there as did the “Death of God” theology of the 1960s. • Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor and the nephew and grandson of Lutheran pastors (mother’s side).
The Rise of Liberalism • N. was influenced by the atheistic philosopher Schopenhauer as well as Ritschl. • His most famous work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, appeared in four parts, 1883-1885; in this he presented two of his most significant ideas: the transvaluation of values and the Ubermensch (Superman); the term was often associated with Nazi racial theories; N’s own translation probably would have been “Overman” or superior man. • N. denounced the Christian values of pity, humility, kindness, and gentleness as weakness and herd morality; he extolled the “will to power” (the power of the great individual ruthlessly pursuing success without moral scruples) as being life’s dominant force.
The Rise of Liberalism • Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a Danish theologian, worked to overthrow the rational pretensions of Hegelianism. • Although well known in Denmark, he was generally shunned as an eccentric because he demanded such a radical Christianity in 19th c. Europe; yet he was extremely influential in Europe after WW I, and he became known as the “father” of Christian existentialism; he is also known as the spiritual founder of the dialectical theology associated with Karl Barth and Neoorthodoxy.
The Rise of Liberalism • Whereas the Ritschlian school emphasized the concept of community, Kierkegaard laid stress on the relation of the individual soul with God almost to the exclusion of the idea of a Christian community; he lambasted the hypocrisy of conventional Christianity and the institutional church, especially the state church of Denmark; he said that where everyone is considered Christian by the conventional act of baptism, Christianity as such does not exist.
The Rise of Liberalism • In his well-known doctrine, “Truth is subjectivity,” he insisted that it is wrong to think of religious truth, or faith, as acquired in the same way one acquires other knowledge; in Christianity, the issue is not objective truth, but the relationship of the existing individual to Christianity. • In true existential form, he held that only a faith which exhibits passionate appropriation of its object is a true faith; since its object cannot be certainly known, faith involves a risk, which K. called the “leap of faith.” • Man, in his sin and finitude, is in no position to resolve his own predicament; salvation can come only from God himself, the Wholly Other, a description which occupied the attention of Neoorthodoxy in the 20th c.
The Rise of Liberalism • Kierkegaard accepted the biblical traditions and was uninterested in the historical criticism of men like D. F. Strauss; but he opposed Hegel’s idea that absolute knowledge is possible and rational, contending instead that man must decide to take the “leap of faith” without proofs of God’s existence.
The Rise of Liberalism • Catholic Modernism. • The counterpart to Protestant Liberalism has usually been referred to as Modernism in the RCC; beginning in the later years of the 19th c., Modernism was a movement aimed at bringing the tradition of Catholic belief into closer relation with the modern outlook in philosophy, the historical, and other sciences and social ideas. • The Catholic Modernists wholeheartedly adopted the critical view of the Bible, and accepted that the biblical writers were subject to many of the limitations of other historians; often they were even more skeptical than the Protestant scholars.
The Rise of Liberalism • Catholic Modernism. • A leading figure was Alfred Firmin Loisy (1857-1940), a French professor who was excommunicated in 1908 for his liberal treatment of the Gospels. • In reply to Harnack’s What Is Christianity?, L. wrote The Gospel and the Church (1902), maintaining that the essence of Christianity is to be found in the faith of the developed church. • It was not necessary to prove that Christ founded a church or established the sacraments; the important fact was the present existence of both; he also concluded that the Gospels did not report reliably the teachings of Jesus but expressed the faith of the early church. • The RCC condemned all his works and excommunicated him.
The Rise of Liberalism • Catholic Modernism. • George Tyrrell (1861-1909), an Irishman converted to Catholicism from high Anglicanism, was another Modernist of note. • T. accepted the apocalyptical interpretation of Jesus and his message as set forth by Loisy, Weiss, and Schweitzer; he held that the important thing about Jesus’ message was its spiritual truth; that Jesus was mistaken in his literal belief in a coming new age is not significant; Jesus was possessed by the truth of a great idea and had to embody it in the limited thought forms of his day. • For his views, T. was dismissed from the Jesuits and deprived of the sacraments.
The Rise of Liberalism • Catholic Modernism. • C. Modernism was most systematically formulated by the Frenchman Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954); his significant work was Dogma and Criticism (1907); he rejected the scholastic conception of dogma, claiming it would lead either to anthropomorphism or agnosticism; instead dogma had a simple twofold purpose of excluding certain false notions and guiding one in his religious life; the resurrection of Christ, for instance, was not to be understood as historical fact but as a guiding principle of Christ’s continuing activity in the world; his book was condemned the same year it was published.
Edouard Le Roy
The Rise of Liberalism • Catholic Modernism. • Leo XIII (1878-1903) at first gave considerable encouragement to the Modernists, but in his later years became increasingly critical. • Pius X (1903-1914) distrusted the movement from the first and condemned it in 1907; in 1910 he imposed an anti-Modernist oath on all suspect clergy and most of the clergy connected with the movement were excommunicated. • Although it was almost completely eradicated, the more recent doctrines of men like Emmanuel Mournier and Teilhard de Chardin reflect vestiges of the earlier Modernism.
April 23, 1073: Hildebrand is elected pope, taking the name Gregory VII. The first pope to excommunicate a ruler (Henry IV), Gregory was driven out of Rome in 1084. "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity," were his last words, "therefore I died in exile.
April 23, 1538: John Calvin and William Farel (whom Calvin was assisting) are banished from Geneva. The day before, Easter Sunday, both had refused to administer communion, saying the city was too full of vice to partake. Three years later, Calvin returned to the city he would forever be associated with (see issue 12: John Calvin).
April 23, 1968: The Evangelical United Brethren Church joins with the much larger Methodist Church, forming the United Methodist Church, the largest Methodist group in the world and America's second-largest Protestant denomination (after the Southern Baptist Convention).
April 24, 387: On this day, Augustine of Hippo writes in his autobiographical Confessions, "We were baptized and all anxiety for our past life vanished away." The 33-year-old had been a teacher of rhetoric and pagan philosophies at some of the Roman Empire's finest schools, but after great influence by his mother, Monica, and the famous bishop Ambrose, he turned to Christianity. His baptism by Ambrose, on Easter Sunday, marked his entrance into the church (see issue 15:Augustine and issue 67:Augustine).
