An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant. Edward Caldwell Moore

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

A. INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      The Protestant Reformation marked an era both in life and thought for the modern world. It ushered in a revolution in Europe. It established distinctions and initiated tendencies which are still significant. These distinctions have been significant not for Europe alone. They have had influence also upon those continents which since the Reformation have come under the dominion of Europeans. Yet few would now regard the Reformation as epoch-making in the sense in which that pre-eminence has been claimed. No one now esteems that it separates the modern from the mediæval and ancient world in the manner once supposed. The perspective of history makes it evident that large areas of life and thought remained then untouched by the new spirit. Assumptions which had their origin in feudal or even in classical culture continued unquestioned. More than this, impulses in rational life and in the interpretation of religion, which showed themselves with clearness in one and another of the reformers themselves, were lost sight of, if not actually repudiated, by their successors. It is possible to view many things in the intellectual and religious life of the nineteenth century, even some which Protestants have passionately reprobated, as but the taking up again of clues which the reformers had let fall, the carrying out of purposes of their movement which were partly hidden from themselves.

      Men have asserted that the Renaissance inaugurated a period of paganism. They have gloried that there supervened upon this paganism the religious revival which the Reformation was. Even these men will, however, not deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation which made the religious reformation possible or, at all events, effective. Nor can it be denied that after the Revolution, in the Protestant communities the intellectual element was thrust into the background. The practical and devotional prevailed. Humanism was for a time shut out. There was more room for it in the Roman Church than among Protestants. Again, the Renaissance itself had been not so much an era of discovery of a new intellectual and spiritual world. It had been, rather, the rediscovery of valid principles of life in an ancient culture and civilisation. That thorough-going review of the principles at the basis of all relations of the life of man, which once seemed possible to Renaissance and Reformation, was postponed to a much later date. When it did take place, it was under far different auspices.

      There is a remarkable unity in the history of Protestant thought in the period from the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth century. There is a still more surprising unity of Protestant thought in this period with the thought of the mediæval and ancient Church. The basis and methods are the same. Upon many points the conclusions are identical. There was nothing of which the Protestant scholastics were more proud than of their agreement with the Fathers of the early Church. They did not perceive in how large degree they were at one with Christian thinkers of the Roman communion as well. Few seem to have realised how largely Catholic in principle Protestant thought has been. The fundamental principles at the basis of the reasoning have been the same. The notions of revelation and inspiration were identical. The idea of authority was common to both, only the instance in which that authority is lodged was different. The thoughts of God and man, of the world, of creation, of providence and prayer, of the nature and means of salvation, are similar. Newman was right in discovering that from the first he had thought, only and always, in what he called Catholic terms. It was veiled from him that many of those who ardently opposed him thought in those same terms.

      It is impossible to write upon the theme which this book sets itself without using the terms Catholic and Protestant in the conventional sense. The words stand for certain historic magnitudes. It is equally impossible to conceal from ourselves how misleading the language often is. The line between that which has been happily called the religion of authority and the religion of the spirit does not run between Catholic and Protestant. It runs through the middle of many Protestant bodies, through the border only of some, and who will say that the Roman Church knows nothing of this contrast? The sole use of recurrence here to the historic distinction is to emphasise the fact that this distinction stands for less than has commonly been supposed. In a large way the history of Christian thought, from earliest times to the end of the eighteenth century, presents a very striking unity.

      In contrast with this, that modern reflection which has taken the phenomenon known as religion and, specifically, that historic form of religion known as Christianity, as its object, has indeed also slowly revealed the fact that it is in possession of certain principles. Furthermore, these principles, as they have emerged, have been felt to be new and distinctive principles. They are essentially modern principles. They are the principles which, taken together, differentiate the thinker of the nineteenth century from all who have ever been before him. They are principles which unite all thinkers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, in practically every portion of the world, as they think of all subjects except religion. It comes more and more to be felt that these principles must be reckoned with in our thought concerning religion as well.

      One of these principles is, for example, that of dealing in true critical fashion with problems of history and literature. Long before the end of the age of rationalism, this principle had been applied to literature and history, other than those called sacred. The thorough going application of this scientific method to the literatures and history of the Old and New Testaments is almost wholly an achievement of the nineteenth century. It has completely altered the view of revelation and inspiration. The altered view of the nature of the documents of revelation has had immeasurable consequences for dogma.

      Another of these elements is the new view of nature and of man's relation to nature. Certain notable discoveries in physics and astronomy had proved possible of combination with traditional religion, as in the case of Newton. Or again, they had proved impossible of combination with any religion, as in the case of Laplace. The review of the religious and Christian problem in the light of the ever increasing volume of scientific discoveries—this is the new thing in the period which we have undertaken to describe. A theory of nature as a totality, in which man, not merely as physical, but even also as social and moral and religious being, has place in a series which suggests no break, has affected the doctrines of God and of man in a way which neither those who revered nor those who repudiated religion at the beginning of the nineteenth century could have imagined.

      Another leading principle grows out of Kant's distinction of two worlds and two orders of reason. That distinction issued in a new theory of knowledge. It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the universe. In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing forever to much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, yet had never been able to prove by any method which the ordered reasoning of man had provided. Religion as feeling regained its place. Ethics was set once more in the light of the eternal. The soul of man became the object of a scientific study.

      There have been thus indicated three, at least, of the larger factors which enter into an interpretation of Christianity which may fairly be said to be new in the nineteenth century. They are new in a sense in which the intellectual elements entering into the reconsideration of Christianity in the age of the Reformation were not new. They are characteristic of the nineteenth century. They would naturally issue in an interpretation of Christianity in the general context of the life and thought of that century. The philosophical revolution inaugurated by Kant, with the general drift toward monism in the interpretation of the universe, separates from their forebears men who have lived since Kant, by a greater interval than that which divided Kant from Plato. The evolutionary view of nature, as developed from Schelling and Comte through Darwin to Bergson, divides men now living from the contemporaries of Kant in his youthful studies of nature, as those men were not divided from the followers of Aristotle.

      Of